Refracted Realism and the Ethical Dominant in Contemporary American Fiction

Home , Focal character, Jennifer Egan, The Human Stain

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Nicolas Joseph Potkalitsky, M.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee:

James Phelan, Advisor

Brian McHale

Frederick Aldama

Nicolas Joseph Potkalitsky

2019

Abstract

Refracted Realism and the Ethical Dominant in Contemporary American Fiction offers three linked pursuits, at once literary-historical and theoretical: (1) a study of the rhetorical dynamics of literary realism, (2) a study of the literary period after postmodernism and the identification of the aesthetic dominant at work in contemporary literature, and (3) a systemic analysis of a distinct mode of realist representation in contemporary American fiction, which I describe as

“refracted realism.” At the intersection between literary realism’s longevity and flexibility, I explore three questions: What interests and engagements drive the interactions between authors and audiences in literary realism? What are the “dominant” features and interactions at work in the literary period after postmodernism? How has literary realism changed under the influence of the new aesthetic dominant? My project combines Roman Jakobson’s and Brian McHale’s concept of the “dominant” with Peter J. Rabinowitz’s and James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory to develop a rhetorically-inflected approach to literary history. In this analytical framework, I identify characteristic and uncharacteristic rhetorical properties, purposes, interests, resources, processes, and engagements in particular works of literature, literary movements, and aesthetic dominants or literary periods and track change and/or continuity accordingly. When theorizing literary realism, I emphasize how representative authors foreground their audiences’ interests and engagements with narrative’s mimetic and thematic components. When conceptualizing the new aesthetic dominant, I point to an ethical one, oriented towards and engaged in various questions and inquiries about value and power. Then when characterizing

“refracted realism,” I define its minimal conditions in terms of the foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components and the ethical aesthetic dominant, even as “refraction”— representative authors’ redeployment of modernist and postmodernist narrative techniques and strategies towards realist ends—proceeds through the handling and oftentimes foregrounding of the synthetic component. “Refracted realism,” as such, represents an important and highly valuable method for engaging with and foregrounding ethical questions and concerns in the contemporary literary period to the extent that these narrative’s “refracted” designs and purposes allow for the consideration of multiple ethical viewpoints and perspectives without foreclosing on the possibility of knowledge and political action. In my case studies, I trace out the historical development of “refracted realism” and showcase the rhetorical, technical, and ethical diversity of this literary aesthetic or movement. Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) serves as a more transitional example of the aesthetic where “refraction” through narratorial “stubbornness” activates an enduring state of tension between the project’s realist and modernist investments.

Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) represent more fully formed versions of refracted realism. Refraction in Open City proceeds more instrumentally, where Cole uses the novel’s complicated narratorial dynamics to cultivate different and at times competing conceptions of the novel’s driving aesthetic interests. In Goon

Squad, refraction focuses on ethical questions and concerns throughout the narrative progression, where Egan uses disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, and future-oriented representation to guide and limit her audience’s interpretive and ethical processes and judgments.

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Dedication

To my loving wife, Sophie, and my two beautiful children, Beatrice and John

Acknowledgements

Over the past decade, many people, places, and institutions have been instrumental to the development and the completion of this dissertation. First, I would like to thank The Ohio State

University and the English Department for offering me the fellowship that started this journey back in 2014. During my fellowship year, I had the invaluable opportunity to take courses with

James Phelan, Amy Shuman, Jared Gardner, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Sandra Macpherson, each of whom contributed in significant ways to my conceptions of literary history and narrative design en route to the surer positions argued for in this dissertation.

I would also like to thank Project Narrative and all of its faculty members for cultivating and maintaining this vital hub of research and intellectual engagement at OSU. The several travel grants I received from Project Narrative played no small part in the development of this project.

One such grant made possible my trip to the 2016 International Society for the Study of

Narrative Conference in Amsterdam where I first conceived the overall design of this project as well as anticipated some of its conclusions.

In addition, I would like to thank my dissertation committee comprised of James Phelan,

Brian McHale, and Frederick Aldama. As my dissertation advisor, James Phelan has had a singular influence on this project from start to finish. As a close reader and a careful editor of every section of this dissertation, he has brought greater clarity to my thinking as well as provided timely input on matters of layout and argument design.

I too would like to thank the many area libraries in which I completed work on this dissertation: Whetstone Library, Worthington Libraries, the State Library of Ohio, and the

Bexley Library. In addition, I would like to thank the Yeah, Me Too coffee shop on Indianola

Ave. for fueling much of my research and writing over the past several years.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and loved ones. I thank my mother and my father for the many educational opportunities I enjoyed when growing up. I thank my loving wife

Sophie Hubbell for her constant support and for opening up a space in our already busy lives for the completion of this project. Sophie also helped greatly with the formatting of the final manuscript. I too would like to thank Sophie’s parents for their love, encouragement, and support. Lastly, I would like to thank my beautiful children Beatrice and John. I wish you both a life filled with love, learning, and adventure!

Vita

2001...... B.A. Latin Language and Literature, Greek

Language and Literature, Oberlin College

2005...... M.Ed. John Carroll University

2010...... M.A. English, Cleveland State University

2015 to 2019 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

2016 to 2018 ...... Assistant to the Editor of Narrative

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Vita ...... vii

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain:

Refracted Realism, Narratorial Stubbornness, Ethical Purposes ...... 24

Chapter 3: Cole’s Refracted Realism in Open City:

Rhetorical Seduction, Delayed Disclosure, Ethical Consequences ...... 57

Chapter 4: Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad:

Disjunctive Storytelling, Ethical Complexity, and Refracted Realism ...... 91

Chapter 5: Conclusion...... 123

Bibliography ...... 134

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Chapter 1: Introduction

In 2010, Jonathan Franzen published his fourth novel Freedom to great critical acclaim.

Michiko Kakutani proclaimed in her review: “Jonathan Franzen’s galvanic new novel, Freedom, showcases his impressive literary toolkit—every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles—and his ability to throw open a big Updikean picture window on American middle-class life.” Sam Tannehaus in a similar vein declared: “Jonathan Franzen’s new novel,

Freedom…is a masterpiece of American fiction.” In no small part this positive reception hinged on the widespread perception that Franzen’s novel was ushering in a new form of literary realism and was at the same time indicative of the onset of a new aesthetic dominant for the period following literary postmodernism. Franzen in Freedom complexly juxtaposes realist, modernist, and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices in an effort to better capture “the way we live now.” As part of his blended aesthetic, Franzen figures two of his chapters as intradiegetic objects composed by a primary character and relies on email correspondences to characterize ongoing action in the novel’s central section. According to Lev Grossman, Franzen as such

“cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism.” Tannenhaus, echoing this reception, argues that “Freedom does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author’s profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.”

Thus, according to these critics, the new aesthetic dominant at work in Franzen’s novel involves

1 a shift toward authenticity, humanism, and ethics, made possible in part by the juxtaposition between his different literary inheritances.

While I am sympathetic with these descriptions of Franzen’s realism and the rising aesthetic dominant in contemporary or twenty-first century US literature, I seek in this dissertation to illuminate how Franzen operates not as a solitary genius but as a part of larger trend or movement. This literary movement is defined by the emergence of a new ethical dominant in the late 1990s in which the characteristic route to ethics is through “refracted realism.” In other words, contemporary writers like Franzen “refract” their realist interests in the mimetic and thematic components of narrative through various modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices. This movement begins to gain traction in the 1990s in selected works by Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, and Colum McCann, but since the turn of the new century, has been taken up by a younger and more diverse group of writers including—but not limited to—Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Chimananda Adichie, Teju Cole,

Lauren Groff, and Jesmyn Ward. Characteristically, these authors use refracted realism to grapple with both the difficulty and necessity of making interpretive and evaluative judgements in an era marked by late capitalism, digital media, globalization, populism, and enduring social, financial, racial, gender and regional inequalities and inequities.

The Emergence of the New Ethical Dominant

The nature of the literary period following literary postmodernism—a movement at its height in the 1970s and 1980s and beginning to “wane” in the 1990s—has been an object of intense scrutiny and debate in the US for several decades. While the 2000s saw many intriguing proposals about the nature of the contemporary literary period, nothing like a consensus has

2 settled in even after over a decade of testing out different hypothesis under headings as diverse as

“dirty realism,” “metamodernism,” “renewalism,” “digimodernism,” “performatism,” and

“cosmodernism.” Of the new descriptions, “post-postmodernism” has gained the widest circulation, but primarily as a placeholder. In other words, the scholars who use the term “post- postmodernism” rarely agree about its precise nature, but the name offers chronological specificity (after postmodernism) that is obscured or complicated in other possibilities. In this dissertation, I am not attempting to come up with a new or more definitive term for the contemporary literary period, but rather taking my lead from Roman Jakobson and Brian

McHale, I seek to theorize the emerging aesthetic “dominant” in this period, using the literary movement of “refracted” realism and my case studies as evidence of this recent shift in aesthetic focus. It is my sense that a new term will come in time, but will probably not be coined by a single academic but rather will emerge collaboratively through a wide range of intra- and extra- artistic actors and agencies.

In Jakobson and McHale, the concept of the dominant represents a way of pushing past reductions of particular literary periods either to particular material and/or historical conditions or to particular narrative techniques and strategies used by representative authors. In his short essay on the dominant, Jakobson defines it first as an individual work’s “focusing component…It rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant that guarantees the integrity of the structure” (82), but goes on to apply the concept to literary periods: “We may seek a dominant not only in the poetic work of an individual artist…but also in the arts of a given epoch, viewed as a particular whole” (83). In Jakobson’s linguistic approach, a literary work is said to have six parts—sender, receiver, message or text, context, channel, and code—and in any

3 given work of art, and by extension any literary period, one or more of these parts or functions is

“dominant” while others play secondary or more minimal roles. In McHale’s development of

Jakobson’s project, he uses the “dominant” to explore the driving questions (aesthetic, philosophical, rhetorical, and thematic) in particular literary works and literary periods. This move allows McHale to theorize in a more nuanced manner the material and/or historical conditions and the aesthetic nature or purpose of narrative techniques and strategies. In McHale’s work, he helpfully distinguishes between “postmodernity” and “postmodernism,” where

“postmodernity” describes the material and/or historical conditions that have informed and influenced literary production since the end of WWII, while “postmodernism” refers to the artistic and literary responses to “postmodernity” wherein artists and authors routinely critique aspects of these material and/or historical conditions. Regarding narrative techniques, McHale seeks to discover the purposes that motivate particular uses, deployments, or redeployments of them. Speaking specifically to “postmodernist” tropes and devices, McHale observes: “While such catalogues do often help us to begin ordering the protean variety of postmodernist phenomena, they also beg important questions, such as the question of why these particular features should cluster in this particular way—in other words, the question of what system might underlies the catalogue—and the question of how in the course of literary history one system has given way to another” (7).

In McHale’s work, these insights lead to two “theses” about the aesthetic dominants of literary modernism and postmodernism. First, McHale argues that “the dominant” of literary modernism “is epistemological” (9). Expanding upon this point, McHale asserts that “modernist fiction deploys strategies that engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick

Higgins…‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? What am I in it?’ Other modernist questions include: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty? How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?” (9). Second, McHale argues that “the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, post-modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as the ones Dick Higgins calls ‘post-cognitive’: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’” (10). Other postmodernist questions include: “What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?;….What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects….And so on” (10).

In this way, McHale sets the stage for my own inquiry into the rising aesthetic dominant in contemporary US literature. In this dissertation, I am exploring the question whether the ontological questions that drove authors in the 1970s and 1980s still drive authors in the 2000s and 2010s. In this context, I am arguing that since the 1990s, many US authors have shifted away from ontological questions and concerns toward ethical ones, and that collectively this movement has amounted to the emergence of a new ethical dominant in contemporary or twentieth-first century US literature. Here, the “ethical” refers primarily to questions about value and power, and does not correspond to any particular set of ethical values or commitments. My project focuses on contemporary US literature partially out of necessity and partially out of design. As I am a scholar of post-1945 US fiction, this is the region and body of literature I can best speak to in the generality and specificity demanded by a project of this nature. That being said, the wide circulation and evident power of certain caricatures of postmodernity and

5 postmodernism in the US context in the 1990s and early 2000s did push many artists and authors toward the reengagement with realist modes of representation and the ethical values and perspective conventionally associated with them.

In the following, I combine Jakobson’s and McHale’s concept of the “dominant” with

Peter J. Rabinowitz’s and James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory to develop a rhetorically- inflected approach to literary history. In Reading the American Novel 1920-2010, Phelan theorizes “four recurring major causes of artistic change” as well as describes “some features of their interaction” (4). First, there are “changes in the extra-artistic realm. Extra-artistic historical events (from wars to scientific discoveries) and evolving social-cultural conditions…spur artists to develop new resources designed to better address the changing extra-artistic realm” (4).

Second, there are “inter-artistic and intra-artistic influence and adaptation. Artists in one field pay attention to artists in other fields and as a result sometimes a feedback loop of influence and adaptation between and among fields develops….At the same time, artists respond to others in their own field, both their contemporaries and those of previous generations” (4-5). Third, there is “the premium of innovation….[T]he horizon of resources is a dynamic entity whose appearance is always subject to change. Or to put the point hyperbolically, once a set of resources becomes highly visible, its historical clock starts counting down” (5). Fourth, there are

“the experiences, capacities, and visions of individual artists as they pursue individual projects…[I]t is often the artist’s efforts to accomplish a particular purpose (or set of purposes) that motivates her to develop new resources” (5). When accounting for the interaction between different kinds of causes and conditions, Phelan observes that “the force of different causes will vary in different interactions” (5), that there is oftentimes a gap between developments in the

6 artistic and the extra-artistic realms, and that “the arrow of causation travels in both directions”

(6). In my own work, I find Phelan’s observations on the interactions between causes very useful as they suggest that rarely do artistic changes flow simply from the extra-artistic to the intra- artistic realm as many literary studies and histories have suggested, but rather that they proceed complexly in relation to a variety of different factors, forces, and feedback loops. In the following, I will address the first three causes and conditions in relation to the new ethical dominant, and will focus on causation at the level of authorial experience and design in my case studies.

When isolating “changes in the extra-artistic realm” that inform the emergence of the new ethical dominant, I seek to engage fruitfully with other scholars of the contemporary literary period like Robert Rebein, Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van der Akker, Christian Moraru, Alan

Kirby, and Jeffery T. Nealon, who each identify renewed interest in ethical questions and concerns as part of its construction. But in contrast with these theorists, I do not seek to isolate one particular cultural, political, historical, or economic event or process as “triggering” a new aesthetic dominant or mode of literary production—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the controversy over political correctness, the wide proliferation of the internet and digital media, the heightened liquidity of economic value in late capitalism, the rise and spread of globalization, 9/11, etc.— but to recognize the complex, cumulative, and incremental influence of all these events/processes and more. Of the existing proposals, I find Kirby’s foregrounding of the internet and digital media to be most persuasive, but even this profound shift in mode and mentality is insufficient to explain the specific nature of the ethical engagements in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain—which features e-mail textuality as an authorial resource but also engages throughout with the ethical

7 consequences of political correctness and the Clinton impeachment—or in Teju Cole’s The Open

City—which too registers the complexity of the new digital economy but also offers a more sustained meditation on the possibility of (literary) ethics in the wake of 9/11. Accordingly, it will be my general practice in this dissertation to work from particular literary engagements to the pertinent extra-artistic causes and conditions.

Regarding “inter-artistic and intra-artistic influence and adaptation,” my project seeks to acknowledge the extraordinary complexity of the US literary landscape during the 1980s and

1990s as artists and authors then sought to either extend the processes and techniques of literary postmodernism to different kinds of ontological questions or to react—sometimes violently—to the prevailing aesthetic by developing new techniques and methods but more often than not by redeploying existing techniques and methods toward new purposes. I also wish to emphasize the power and pervasiveness of different caricatures of literary postmodernism during this time period and their influence—in tandem with other causes and conditions—on individual authors in choosing particular literary methods, aesthetics, and genres and in pursuing particular kinds of inquiries, questions, and concerns. In these caricatures, postmodernist literature was equated with

“the endless multiplication of meaning,” “epistemological and ontological indeterminacy,”

“ethical ambivalence or disengagement,” “parody,” “irony,” “metafictional play,” etc. While these descriptions can be said to apply—but even then poorly and inaccurately—to a subset of postmodernist fiction, their pervasiveness and growing force across a number of different cultural, political, aesthetic, and social discourses in the 1990s and 2000s sent many US artists and authors off in different directions. Two directions interest me the most in this study. Some authors pressed on with a postmodernist aesthetic focused on ontological questions and concerns

8 but with a broader engagement with the ethical issues that stem from ontological blurring, breakdown, and erasure. In this group, authors like David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski,

Jonathan Safran Foer, and Lorrie Moore continued to foreground ontological questions and concerns but with a notable subdominant focused on ethical issues. Other authors pursued literatures focused on questions of culture, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and identity, in some cases continuing to rely on postmodernist narrative strategies and in other cases pursuing something closer to a realist aesthetic. In this second group, authors as diverse as Toni Morrison,

Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, Julia Alvarez, Alexie Sherman, and Sandra Cisneros anticipate and even hasten the emergence of the new ethical dominant by reframing epistemological and ontological controversies insistently in relation to questions of culture, history, power, and value.

“The premium on innovation” manifests itself complexly across something as broad and variegated as an aesthetic dominant. In the highly saturated and intensely competitive contemporary US literary market, authors have sought to distinguish their literary projects from their forbears (and from their colleagues) in a variety of different ways. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rising or “waxing” of a new ethical dominant presented ample opportunities for doing so. With numerous writers, critics, and publishers proclaiming the “waning” or “wake” of literary postmodernism during this time period, a focus on ethical and/or political questions and concerns stood out as distinctive or as something of a departure. But an ethical destination or purpose by no means entailed a prescribed method or single path. Rather, during the transitional period of the 1990s and early 2000s, US authors explored a variety of different narrative, rhetorical, and aesthetic methodologies and an expanding set of historical and contemporary

9 themes in their collective movement toward a new ethical dominant. For the purposes of my analysis, I distinguish between three different possibilities within this new ethically-oriented movement, which actual literary practice thoroughly blurs and complicates.

First, the “waning” of the postmodernist aesthetic and the transitional period of the 1990s spurred some artists and authors to develop new narrative strategies and literary aesthetics, which in some cases were ethically-oriented and in other cases focused on other kinds of questions and concerns. Second, in light of the profusion of new and innovative techniques and methodologies developed under the modernist and postmodernist aesthetic dominants, authors during this transitional period generally struggled to strike out in completely new or innovative directions, and so in actual practice, regularly turned to the redeployment of existing narrative techniques and strategies and the reconfiguration of existing literary aesthetics toward new or different purposes. Here, I echo McHale and the Russian formalists in saying that narrative devices and strategies become affiliated with particular aesthetics and dominants through repeated use, attaining something of a conventional status in those contexts. For instance, stream-of- consciousness narration is frequently used by modernist authors, and metafiction has become a narrative resource most associated with literary postmodernism. That being said, authors are free to use a “modernist” or “postmodernist” narrative strategy or device toward new or different purposes—to get at different questions and concerns—given that their narrative projects can accommodate such a shift and that their audiences are adequately prepared for the shift and sufficiently guided in its direction. Third, there are also authors who reacted to the “waning” of literary postmodernism by returning more “wholesale” to earlier or already existing literary aesthetics. Some realist authors, for instance, more matter-of-factly returned to historical or

10 traditional versions of the realist aesthetic. In his article, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,”

Tom Wolfe famously called for such a return, framing his realist novel The Bonfire of the

Vanities (1987) as a kind of referendum on literary postmodernism.

Thickening the Description

In my rhetorically-inflected approach to literary history, I acknowledge with Wayne C.

Booth, Martha Nussbaum, Adam Newton, Peter J. Rabinowitz, James Phelan, and many others that all literature and narrative has some sort of ethical aspect or dimension. In what Phelan calls

“the ethics of the told,” characters or individuals are routinely engaged with various questions about value and power. In what he calls “the ethics of the telling,” authors engage their readers in a variety of different interpretive and ethical judgments that inform complexly their aesthetic judgments about a given project. While it is possible to say that in the contemporary literary period, authors use modernist and postmodernist narrative techniques and strategies to complicate or intensify this ethical substructure, the “ethical dominant” does not primarily refer to this substructure—except as a means or a method of conveyance—but rather to the characteristic or driving “aesthetic, philosophical, rhetorical, and thematic” interests and concerns of many works of contemporary US literature. In other words, I am not arguing that contemporary US literature is intrinsically more ethical than its postmodernist counterpoint—

McHale’s and other’s studies have indicated the profound ethical potentiality of postmodernist ontological-oriented inquiries—but rather that contemporary US authors foreground ethical questions and concerns more insistently than their modernist or postmodernist forbears do. Here,

I define “ethical” quite expansively as pertaining to questions about value and power in an effort to emphasize the profound diversity and complexity of ethical interests, engagements, and

11 commitments that occur under the new ethical dominant. Again, ethically-oriented contemporary authors are free to choose different methodologies, approaches, and modes to explore specific ethical questions and concerns. The key here is that contemporary US authors in general have shifted in orientation and purpose away from literary postmodernism’s ontological questions and concerns toward ethical ones. In an attempt to further specify the new ethical dominant, I offer a series of questions that run parallel to McHale’s foundational questions for literary modernism and postmodernism, discussed earlier: “How can I evaluate this world of which I am a part? And what values should I rely on? What does it mean to evaluate or value? Where do values originate from? How do values evolve? Why do values change? Is there such a thing as an absolute or universal value? How should I act or behave? Based on circumstance or principle? How should I treat other persons? How should I interact with the environment? What is the ethical significance of a work of art and literature? Why do I value some works of art and literature more than others?”

In my dissertation, I explore one literary movement in recent and contemporary US literature—with its origins in the 1990s and growing steadily since the early 2000s—as indicative of the emergence of a new ethical dominant in which the characteristic route to ethics is through “refracted realism.” With Phelan, I define literary realism in terms of its relative foregrounding of mimetic and thematic components. In Phelan’s early work, he theorized three primary “components” of character. Referring more specifically to the three primary points of interest that readers have in characters, Phelan distinguishes between “mimetic,” “thematic,” and

“synthetic” components. In later work, Phelan applies these interests or components to narrative more generally, resulting in what he describes as the “MTS” (mimetic-thematic-synthetic)

12 approach to rhetorical interactions and narrative designs. “Mimetic” as such refers to “readers’ interests in the characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like our own, that is, hypothetically or conceptually possible and still compatible with the laws and limitations that govern the extratextual world” (Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates 7). In this way, Phelan engages with a longstanding discussion about literary mimesis, but more insistently than his poststructuralist forbears acknowledges an ontological reality that exists apart from human knowledge or conception. That being said, Phelan has subsequently developed an approach to the mimetic component that includes a mimesis of “extratextual” ontology and a mimesis of literary convention. In the second sense, Phelan cites, for instance, the convention of heterodiegetic narrators who have “the power to access the consciousness of different characters in their storyworlds and to move—without the need for real-world modes of transportation and without the passage of storytime—from one location to another” (“Implausibilities, Crossovers, and Impossibilities” 170). Thus, authors can breach or depart from the “mimetic” in either sense, and as Phelan goes on to explore, these departures can be recuperated or framed so that they minimally disturb a work’s dominant system of probability. For instance, a realist author might evoke what Phelan describes as “The Rule of Partial Continuity” or “The Value-Added Meta-

Rule,” restricting a mimetic break to just one aspect of the narration, using that departure more generally to enhance the reading experience by, for instance, “allowing access to relevant information that would not be available without the breaks” (174, 175). In part, it is this flexibility of the mimetic component that makes it possible for authors to wield modernist and postmodernist narrative techniques and strategies toward different ends and purposes.

In Phelan, “thematic” refers to “readers’ interests in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed in the narrative” (Narrative Theory 7). In realist narratives, the thematic component works in close alignment with the mimetic component. While realist authors do not necessarily have to route their thematic considerations through their mimetic engagements, they characteristically do so, taking advantage of readers’ responses to the mimetic component including “evolving judgments and emotions, our desires, hopes, expectations, satisfactions, and disappointments” toward particular thematic inquiries and conclusions (7). In Phelan, “synthetic” describes “an audience’s interest in and attention to characters and to the larger narrative as artificial constructs, interests that link up with our aesthetic judgments” (7). In many realist narratives, authors relatively foreground the mimetic and thematic components while relatively backgrounding the synthetic component. Here, “relatively” is an important qualification, for in actual practice, readers engage with all three components simultaneously as all narratives possess all three components.

Then, when further specifying the refracted realist aesthetic, I add to the relative foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components—the “realist interests” of my representative authors—the redeployment of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices coupled with an ethical aesthetic dominant. As I will explore at length in the following, these redeployments frequently involve the activation and intensification of the synthetic component toward specific ethical questions and concerns. As such, I define the minimal conditions of refracted realism in terms of the mimetic and thematic components and the ethical dominant, but where representative authors frequently use refraction through modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies to emphasize and even foreground the synthetic

14 component. Refracted realism comes with its own “added value” process built in to the extent that representative authors can choose to complicate and even disrupt the neat alignment between the mimetic and thematic components to varying degrees but at the same time can recuperate that disruption by directing its energies and tensions toward specific ethical questions and concerns or more generally toward the cultivation of a particular kind of ethical response or experience at the level of the total work.

My Case Studies

In describing this literary movement as “refracted realism,” I am borrowing and repurposing the concept of “refraction” from optics and crystallography to describe analogically the complex dynamics and interactions between realist interests in the mimetic and thematic components, modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices, and the ethical dominant in my representative authors. In optics and crystallography, “refraction” describes the process of light “being deflected in passing obliquely through the interface between one medium and another” (Dictionary.com). Characteristically, a refracted light wave will maintain many of its original properties even as the intermediary medium deflects its path, altering its speed, direction, and color. In this dissertation, I will focus on how my representative authors “refract” their realist interests through or using modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices in pursuit of ethical purposes and inquiries. Through this metaphor, I wish to highlight how my representative authors remain inside a steady continuum of realist literary production since the origins of the aesthetic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conceptualizing that continuum rhetorically in terms of the relative foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components and relative backgrounding of the synthetic component. In speaking to this

15 continuum, Ramón Saldívar understands “literary realism” as “the substratum of narrative that had never been superseded entirely within the history of narrative forms” (“The Second

Elevation of the Novel” 14) and explores in several recent articles how authors like Colson

Whitehead and Salvador Plascencia use “speculative realism” to modulate this “substratum” toward specific ethical and political ends. That being said, I do not wish to impose premature limits on the nature and process of literary refraction, but rather to use my case studies to illuminate several different methods of refraction, while not precluding the existence of other kinds or methods of refraction operative in works of refracted realism not considered in this dissertation. In my case studies, I examine three noteworthy examples of refracted realism—

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), and Jennifer Egan’s A

Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)—that together showcase the wide range of possibilities within the process of literary refraction and chronologically survey the development of refracted realism under the emergence of the ethical dominant from transitional to more developed modes or expressions.

In my first case study, I examine Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, characterizing it as a

“transitional” example of refracted realism, wherein Roth uses narratorial stubbornness to cultivate an abiding and enduring tension between his novel’s epistemological and ethical engagements. In this case, “refraction” proceeds through oscillation or alternation between different aesthetic dominants, involving engagements with earlier aesthetics and movement toward the rising ethical dominant. In Human Stain, Roth establishes a constitutive ambiguity at the level of the novel’s narration. Initially, Roth leads his readers to believe that the narrator

Nathan Zuckerman is narrating only the novel’s homodiegetic sections, then “floats” a

16 competing hypothesis that Zuckerman is in fact the narrator of the entire novel, but concludes the novel with both possibilities still “up in the air.” This “stubbornness” has a significant impact on readers’ interpretive and evaluative processes as they attempt to sort between intratextual “fact” and “fiction” in the heterodiegetic sections. In the novel’s first hypothesis, the heterodiegetic sections proceed much like omniscient narration in the realist tradition offering readers access to actual events and experiences in the narrative world. In its second hypothesis, these same sections proceed as Zuckerman’s imaginative reconstructions of actual events and unfold more complexly in relation to his own perceptions, assumptions, biases, and values. Together, these hypotheses or interpretive and evaluative possibilities caution readers not to rush to judgment and to consider carefully the nature of the sources of particular information, particularly when ascribing ethical values. Notably, “stubbornness” does not prevent many readers from concluding with Nathan that Les Farley is Coleman’s killer, but such readers cannot make their cases on the basis of “hard evidence.”

In my second case, I study Teju Cole’s Open City, characterizing it as a clearer or more developed example of refracted realism, wherein Cole uses the narrator Julius to initially focus his readers on epistemological questions and concerns, but when revealing the narrator’s profound ethical deficiency ushers in a complex and multilayered ethical critique. Conceptually, this novel exhibits a more instrumental method of “refraction” wherein Cole cultivates the initial perception of his work as a neo-modernist epistemological experiment but then much later in the narrative progression fully activates the novel’s many ethical interests and engagements through delayed disclosure. In the first twenty chapters of Open City, Cole enacts a “rhetorical seduction” foregrounding his narrator Julius’s apparent ethics, aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and skills of

17 articulation and analysis. In his narrations, Julius describes the long walks he takes through the streets of New York City, during which he contemplates how the city is a “palimpsest” wherein its present power, prestige, and global authority are complexly rooted in historical and ongoing violence, trauma, racism, genocide, and economic and social inequity. But when readers learn in the chapter twenty that Julius raped Moji, an acquaintance of a friend, when he was a teenager, they are forced to examine their initial alignment and even complicity in the interpretive and evaluative systems explored and relied on by Julius. At this point, readers also realize that Cole has during the rhetorical seduction imbued his narrator with an improbable lack of knowledge or

“paradoxical paralipsis.” While the narration begins after Julius is confronted about the rape, he indicates no knowledge of that confrontation in the first twenty chapters. Some readers and critics have argued that Julius is purposefully withholding this information, tilting the novel’s aesthetic back toward literary modernism in relation Julius’s profound unreliability. But in my approach, I foreground rhetorical seduction and paradoxical paralipsis as important tools of refraction toward ethical purposes, allowing Cole to immerse his readers in the attractions, limitations, and dangers of Julius’s theoretical investments.

In my third case, I examine Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, characterizing it too as a clearer or more developed example of “refracted realism,” wherein Egan uses disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, future-oriented representation among other modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and techniques to guide her readers toward particular ethical values and judgments, while also putting significant limits on the scope and reach of those values and judgments in relation to the novel’s considerable gaps in time and representation. Here, Egan uses a method of “refraction” that foregrounds ethical questions and

18 concerns from the beginning to end, marked by intermittent chapter-long redeployment of specific modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices such as second-person narration, multimodal textuality, metafiction, and intradiegetic objects, in an effort to highlight the significant ethical potentialities of each of these techniques. In particular, Egan uses disjunctive temporality and multiple narration to cultivate across her narrative progression what

Corinne Bancroft has recently described as “narrative braiding.” In Egan’s two thickest braids, she explores the lives and ethical developments of characters Sasha and Bennie, and uses the contrast and intersections between these braids to highlight the very different affordances available to these characters, positioned on different sides of the gender divide. In the novel's final two chapters, Egan substantially refracts her realist interests by setting narrative action in the not-too-distant future—the 2020’s—but recuperates this mimetic departure by using this move to “fill out” her ethical and realist portraits of her main characters. Therein, Egan continues to highlight the ongoing effects of patriarchy and misogyny, but also pivots toward the consideration of the methods or modes of storytelling most responsive to her characters’ ethical crises and controversies. In these final chapters, Egan contrasts Alison’s PowerPoint and Sasha’s

“found object” collages with Bennie’s social media scheme and a future-version of texting, and while no method proves itself to be intrinsically ethically salutary, Egan affirms Alison’s and

Sasha’s more “open” approaches over Bennie’s more appropriative methods.

The Significance of the Project

Most broadly conceived, the purposes of this dissertation project are threefold: (1) the identification and theorization of a significant subset of realist representation in contemporary

US literature—refracted realism—that maintains a significant dialogue with the literary

19 aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism but characteristically redeploys narrative strategies and techniques associated with these aesthetics toward ethical questions and concerns; (2) the identification and theorization of the emergence of an ethical aesthetic dominant in the “waning” or “wake” of literary postmodernism in which representative authors foreground ethical questions and concerns about value and power in their literary projects and through their diverse aesthetic affiliations and ethical engagements; and (3) the develop of a rhetorically-inflected approach to literary history, combining Jakobson’s and McHale’s concept of the “dominant” with Rabinowitz’s and Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory to use rhetorical markers like

Phelan’s mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components to track artistic change and continuity over time.

In this dissertation, I do not seek to identify and theorize all realist representational practices in contemporary US literature, but a specific subset. As noted earlier, many contemporary realist authors have pursued a more “wholesale” return to historical or traditional versions of literary realism, while others, like those authors that Saldívar has examined, pursue more synthetically-oriented forms of realism such as speculative or magic realism. In between these two options or approaches, I situate the literary movement of “refracted realism” wherein representative authors rely consistently on modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices but without completely disrupting their realist interests in foregrounding the mimetic and thematic components. Refracted realism as a literary movement brings together a diverse group of authors including—but not limited to—selected works by Roth, Kingsolver, Franzen,

McCann, Díaz, Adichie, Cole, Groff, Egan, and Ward. That authors with such a wide range of different perspectives, ethnicities, cultural and racial identities, and countries of origin have

20 adopted this mode of literary realism is significant in that it indicates refracted realism’s general flexibility and adaptability to a wide range of different projects, purposes, ideological affiliations, and ethical commitments and its potentiality for further adaptation, development, and complication. Notably, these authors are not only critically acclaimed but popularly engaging and accessible. Their work as such functions as an important part of contemporary US and more global conversations about ethics, politics, aesthetics, race, ethnicity, and culture and collectively grapple with both the difficulty and necessity of making interpretive and evaluative judgements in an era marked by late capitalism, digital media, globalization, populism, and ever present social, financial, racial, gender, and regional inequalities and inequities. At this level, my study speaks more generally to the continued and lasting significance of realism as a literary and cultural instrument for the establishment and destabilization of social, cultural, political, and ethical norms and conventions. Historically, scholarship has tended to isolate realism’s literary and cultural function to one or the other of these options, but my work on refracted realism indicates how realist texts simultaneously authorize and undermine specific codes, norms, and conventions.

In bringing Jakobson’s and McHale’s concept of the dominant to bear on existing analyses and ongoing conversations about the nature of the literary period following postmodernism, I seek to shift the focus of the conversation to questions about orientations and purposes. Existing approaches tend to focus on possible “triggering” events, characteristic narrative techniques and strategies, and driving ideological and philosophical affiliations. In the process, scholars and critics usually isolate a relatively small subset of contemporary literary production as representative or “metonymic” of a greater shift or change “on the rise.” While

21 these efforts are both exciting and illuminating, it is my sense that the rush to find the right

“metonymic subset” and to give it the right “name”—one that registers both where this subset has come from and where it is going—has led to premature characterizations of the literary contemporary as “metamodernism,” “digimodernism,” “cosmodernism,” or “post- postmodernism.” After surveying these efforts, I propose that we focus less on specific names, events, techniques, and ideological and philosophical affiliations, and more on the purposes that motivate or “orient” authorial reactions to particular events and processes and on authorial engagements with particular narrative strategies and techniques and particular intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic affiliations. Thus, I intend my description of the new aesthetic dominant to function not as a procrustean bed, clamping down on aesthetic diversity and authorial creativity, but rather as a broad and expansive field of discourse or aesthetic horizon, one in which many different definitions of the “ethical,” many different ethical values and commitments, and many different literary approaches to ethical questions and concerns freely circulate.

Finally, in my dissertation project, I seek to combine Jakobson’s and McHale’s concept of the “dominant” with Rabinowitz’s and Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory to develop a rhetorically-inflected approach to literary history. With Rabinowitz and Phelan, I broadly conceptualize narrative as a communicative action, functioning complexly through a feedback loop between authorial purposes, textual constructions, and reader responses. In this analytical framework, it becomes possible to talk about characteristic (and uncharacteristic) rhetorical properties, purposes, interests, resources, processes, and engagements in particular works of literature, literary movements, and aesthetic dominants or literary periods. Then with such

22 characteristic markers in hand, rhetorical theorists can begin to theorize at the scale of individual works or larger literary periods about how and why particular literary phenomena change or stay the same. While this approach does not offer exclusive access to “the-thing-in-itself,” it is an important and valuable method to the extent that it seeks to engage with and in some case re- conceptualize existing conceptions of individual literary works, movements, and periods at the critical threshold where authors and audiences intersect. In my project, this rhetorically-inflected approach has been critical in identifying the nature and rhetorical dynamics of refracted realism.

When many scholars have looked and seen “sameness,” my rhetorical emphasis on communicative action and aesthetic purpose has allowed me to see “difference.” Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a case in point. Whereas most critics regard the work as a solid example of literary postmodernism, I have asked questions about the purposes of Egan’s uses of various postmodernist narrative strategies and devices and have arrived at a different conception of her project.

Chapter 2: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain:

Refracted Realism, Narratorial Stubbornness, Ethical Purposes

In The Human Stain (2000), Philip Roth completes his American trilogy (American

Pastorale [1995], I Married a Communist [1998]) with the story of a classics professor, Coleman

Silk, who was born African American and passes as white and Jewish for much of his adult and professional life, before dying tragically in a car crash. In this novel’s distinctive telling, Roth alternates between what appears to be homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration across its narrative progression. Here, I am initially defining “homodiegetic” and “heterodiegetic” in terms of the presence or absence of explicit I references by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s notorious alter ego, a situation that becomes more complicated when later in the novel Nathan suggests that he is the covert narrator of the heterodiegetic content. In the homodiegetic sections—comprising much of chapter one, a small introductory section in chapter four, and the entirety of chapter five—Nathan describes and analyzes his friendship with Coleman in the mid-1990s. Late in

Coleman’s career, he is accused of using a racist epithet (“spooks”) while teaching class, and several months later, after the death of his wife Iris, he ceases fighting the charge, resigns from

Athena College, and seeks out his neighbor Nathan Zuckerman, the “famous writer,” to pen his apology and life story. While Nathan politely declines Silk’s offer, a strong friendship develops between the two men, which gradually lifts Nathan out of an extended period of depression and isolation. In the final chapters, Nathan reveals how he learned of Coleman’s African American

24 ancestry—a long conversation with his sister Ernestine after Coleman’s funeral—and makes clear that he is now working on his own version of Coleman’s life, which he has provisionally given the title of “The Human Stain,” but Roth strategically keeps the exact relationship between

Nathan’s manuscript and the book his readers hold in their hands ambiguous. In the heterodiegetic sections, comprising the entirety of chapters two and three and a significant portion of chapter four, Roth explores the history of Coleman’s passing, working from

Coleman’s initial conception of the idea or possibility of passing in his late adolescence all the way to the “spooks incident,” his tragic death, and the events that take place immediately thereafter in the fictional town of Athena. These heterodiegetic sections also feature several extended portraits of other major characters in the novel including Faunia Farley (Coleman’s girlfriend), Les Farley (Faunia’s ex-husband), and Delphine Roux (a colleague at Athena College who spearheads the “spooks” investigation) around the time of Coleman and Faunia’s deaths in a suspicious car crash in late 1998. In these vignettes, Roth registers the impact of Coleman’s life and choices upon other persons in his circle as well as offers sustained realist character studies in their own right.

Across The Human Stain’s narrative progression, Roth invites his readers to entertain different hypotheses about its narratorial situation. In the first three chapters, Roth keeps the relationship between the homodiegetic and heterodiegetic sections relatively stable. After fifty pages of introductory homodiegetic narration in chapter one, Roth shifts into a more heterodiegetic mode in the second half of that chapter and continues in that mode for the entirety of chapters two and three, sections which collectively do not feature any explicit I references to

Nathan Zuckerman. As a result, most readers understand the narratorial source at this point in the

25 narrative progression as an extradiegetic narrator or in Roger Edholm’s recent work on the novel as an “authorial disclosure,” particularly as these sections include the close and careful description of many episodes that Nathan was not present for and would not likely have such exhaustive knowledge of even in light of the indirect channels for such information presented in the novel’s final two chapters. In what follows, I will describe the resulting narratorial situation in terms of Roth’s foregrounding of the reportorial dimension of the heterodiegetic narrations, meaning that most readers initially regard chapter one’s concluding description of Les Farley’s nearly lethal encounters with Coleman in the summer of 1998 or chapters two’s descriptions of

Coleman’s falling out with his family of origin as representing actual affairs in the narrative world.

Here, a term like Marie Laure Ryan’s “fictional facts” is helpful, re-conceptualized as those states of affairs that remain ontologically stable across a narrative’s different narratorial perspectives, as long as we keep in mind that Roth has intentionally designed this novel’s narrative progression to complicate and problematize his reader’s initial reception of said “facts.”

In this way, Roth’s work intimates that the quality of being a “fictional fact” is often subject to revision across a particular reading, although in most narratives, particularly a realist one like

Roth’s The Human Stain, many events and experiences maintain that quality through a work’s conclusion. With this initial narratorial situation in place, Roth invites his readers into relatively strong interpretive and evaluative judgments of particular characters’ thoughts, words, and actions. For instance, the initial reading of chapters one through three leaves little room for doubt in the reader’s mind that Les Farley is somehow involved in Coleman and Faunia’s deaths, that

Coleman decides to pass not because of racial oppression or violence, but in light of an

26 individualist desire to pursue his own destiny and the pleasures he derives from living a secret life, and that Coleman’s decision to pass has played a critical part in his strained relationships with his children and his wife. Here, it should be apparent that while in the heterodiegetic sections Roth foregrounds that narration’s reportorial dimension, the narration also includes numerous interpretive and evaluative conclusions about the fictional facts described therein. In other words, the heterodiegetic sections are not just a catalog of events, but also function as an integral part of the novel’s overall narrative progression designed to steer readers towards initial judgments about that content, judgments which are later complicated and reconfigured.

Roth first complicates the novel’s narratorial dynamics by reintroducing Nathan

Zuckerman in the introductory section of chapter four as the possible covert narrator of the heterodiegetic narration in chapter one through three, and second extends that complication by not definitively determining Nathan’s role in any of the heterodiegetic narrations by the novel’s conclusion. In this chapter, I argue that Roth innovatively uses stubbornness, which I define with

James Phelan as “textual recalcitrance that does not yield to interpreters’ efforts to master it”

(Somebody 82) at the level of the novel’s narratorial situation, resulting in a distinctive mode of realistic representation I am describing as “refracted realism.” When in chapter four, Nathan reappears as narrator of its introductory materials he only partially claims knowledge of the contents of the preceding three chapters, referring specifically only to their descriptions of events in the present or primary narrative, which comprises only half of the materials in chapters two and three. But when Nathan indicates near the conclusion of the introductory section in chapter four that he is writing “this book,” most readers and critics understand Nathan as implying there more strongly his global narratorhood, with many in this group also concluding that there is a

27 strong equivalence between Nathan’s manuscript and the book readers hold in their hands. But significantly, Roth continues to send mixed signals about the novel’s narratorial situation throughout the remainder of the novel. For instance, the novel’s possible metaleptic references

(“this book”) are not as straightforward as they first appear. As Edholm has recently argued, these references, while possibly metaleptic, also could correspond to texts within the narrative world, thus evoking “someone-telling-a-story” as a key thematic without necessitating a more strict equivalence between Nathan’s manuscript and Roth’s novel. More pointedly though, Roth concludes the novel in medias res, with Nathan en route to gathering more information for his manuscript-in-progress, either raising the possibility that Nathan has intentionally written a narrative in which he has not yet finished said manuscript, or more plausibly, that the relationship between Nathan’s manuscript and Roth’s novel is more oblique or ambiguous.

In the following, I will not just highlight such contradictory or mixed signals, but I will also attempt to coordinate them inside a new conception of the novel’s rhetorical and ethical purposes, hinging on the stubbornness of its narratorial situation. In summary, Roth maintains narratorial stubbornness because of the kinds of ethical processes and judgments it elicits for and from his readers. When invited to regard the heterodiegetic sections as Nathan’s covert narrations, readers shift much of their interpretive and evaluative energies from character- character interactions to Nathan’s motivations, purposes, and consequences of representing them in the way he does, i.e., in a manner that is in part interested in actual affairs in the narrative world but also is imaginatively reconstructive when epistemological access fails. But stubbornness prevents this novel from becoming an analysis purely of Nathan’s narratorial processes, activating what I am describing as a more refracted mode of realistic representation,

28 where some events hold stable across all narratorial hypotheses and where others are left purposefully overdetermined or ambiguous. While Nathan’s unreliability—here conceptualized dually in terms of Nathan’s imaginative departures and his delayed disclosure of his narratorial role—initially aligns Roth’s project with literary modernism’s epistemological concerns, stubbornness ultimately redirects the novel’s rhetorical project towards refracted realism’s characteristic ethical orientation and questions. In particular, Roth’s novel focuses on ethical questions related to its two key thematics of “the human stain” and “the ecstasy of sanctimony.”

Here, “the human stain” is an expansive, post-theological concept that Roth uses to describe the interconnectedness and co-implication of human beings, while “the ecstasy of sanctimony” speaks to the tendency of many of the novel’s characters to attempt to defy that interconnectedness and co-implication through various schemes. In the novel’s complicated design, these thematics hold fast across both ways of interpreting its narratorial situations

(Nathan is or is not the global narrator). Roth uses the stubbornness to raise ethical questions about these thematics simultaneously at the level of the telling and the told. In this way, Roth’s novel explores the insistent call for ethical certainty in American culture, society, and politics in the face of ongoing epistemological complexities and ambiguities at work in the second half of the twentieth century, while using the narratorial dynamics of his novel to intimate the possibility of a more contextual or even refracted mode of judgment in between these two driving intellectual and social imperatives.

The Human Stain’s Narrative Bedrock and Its Relation to Roth's Ethical Concerns

In The Human Stain, Roth maintains something like a “narrative bedrock,” denoting here those events and experiences that are “fictional facts” or ontologically stable across both of the

29 novel’s narratorial hypotheses and through its stubborn conclusion. Conceptually, this narrative bedrock serves to stabilize or “ground” readers’ engagements with the novel’s more stubborn features and sections. As already suggested, what comes to count as a “fictional fact” in The

Human Stain proceeds by a complex function or calculus across the novel’s narratorial hypotheses and narrative progression. In the first three chapters where the narration’s reportorial dimension is foregrounded, the list of such facts is quite expansive, including for instance the exhaustive details reported about Coleman’s upbringing and maturation in chapters two and three. But when Nathan suggests his covert narratorhood in chapter four and then when narratorial stubbornness of the heterodiegetic ultimately sets in, Roth shrinks or rather qualifies the list.

The narrative bedrock of The Human Stain is comprised of three primary areas. First, in the novel’s homodiegetic sections, Roth provides many details about Nathan Zuckerman including his personal history leading up to his move to Athena in the early 1990s and his frame of mind when later becoming friends with Coleman Silk in the mid-1990s. Second, also in the novel’s homodiegetic sections, Roth offers a compelling portrait of Nathan and Coleman’s friendship, lasting close to two years, which began with Coleman’s search for an apologist and a biographer and concluded abruptly in the summer of 1998, when Coleman without explanation cut off all contact with Nathan. Third, in both the novel’s homodiegetic and heterodiegetic sections, Roth provides the basic details of Coleman’s personal history including his childhood, his passing as white and Jewish, his professional development, his marriage with Iris, and their family life together, all of which holds fast across the novel’s competing narratorial hypotheses.

In the first area of the novel’s narrative bedrock, Roth situates many details about

Nathan’s personal history. In the homodiegetic narration in chapter one, readers learn that he moved to Athena, a small college town in Western Massachusetts, in the early 1990s.

Determined to leave behind the “sexual caterwaul” of his previous, more urban habitation and lifestyle, Nathan learns within months of moving to Athena that he has prostate cancer, which leaves him partially incontinent and completely impotent. With his erotic horizons so limited,

Nathan pours himself into his writing and experiences a time of great productivity, marked by the evenness of a daily routine and the relative isolation of his cabin several miles outside of town. That being said, Nathan is quite sad and lonely, and only realizes after meeting Coleman how deep of a depression he had sunk into during his writerly retreat. Into this retreat, Coleman

Silk stumbles one day after the sudden death of his wife Iris, beginning what Nathan portrays as possibly the last great friendship of his life.

In the second area of the novel’s narrative bedrock, Roth likewise situates chapter one’s portrait of Nathan and Coleman’s friendship. There, a few episodes and events stand out as particularly noteworthy for this analysis. After Nathan refuses to write Coleman’s biography and apology, the two men meet regularly on Saturday nights at Coleman’s home to listen to music and play cards. According to Nathan, Coleman uses these get-togethers primarily as an opportunity to work through his immense grief for his wife and to vent his ongoing personal frustrations with the “spooks” investigation and its fallout, but eventually their dynamic begins to change. In the early summer of 1998, Coleman reveals to Nathan that he is having an affair with

Faunia Farley, a woman half his age who works as a janitor at the college and a local post office.

On the night of this revelation, Coleman asks Nathan to dance, and Nathan surprises himself by

31 accepting the offer. At this point a new and more intimate stage of their friendship begins, which while not explicitly sexual has definite erotic overtones. As Nathan later notes, “Coleman Silk danced me right back into life” (45). In the week following their dance, Coleman shows Nathan a mysterious note recently mailed to his house, accusing him of sexually exploiting and abusing

Faunia. At this time, the two men go together to visit Faunia at the dairy farm where she works and lives. In the final moments of their friendship, Coleman reports to Nathan that he is being stalked by Les Farley, Faunia’s ex-husband, but notably Roth does not confirm nor deny this supposition in the chapter’s homodiegetic sections. Later in the summer, after Coleman inexplicably cuts off contact, the two men encounter one another at an orchestral rehearsal in

Tanglewood, but there Coleman abruptly concludes their conversation, giving false promises that he will get back in contact soon.

In the third area of the novel’s narrative bedrock, Roth situates many details from

Coleman’s personal history. Coleman was born into an African American family in New Jersey in the early part of the twentieth century. As a boy and young man, Coleman grew up relatively unaware of race prejudice, and excelled as a student and as an athlete. After high school,

Coleman moves to Washington D.C. to attend Howard University, where he experiences race prejudice for the first time. After the death of his father, Coleman quits college and joins the US

Navy as a white man. Returning home from service, Coleman settles in New York’s Greenwich

Village where he continues to pass as white and Jewish. Later, Coleman cuts himself off entirely from his family of origin to pursue a prestigious career as a professor and dean at Athena

College. Late in his career, Coleman returns to classroom teaching, and several weeks into the semester refers to two students who have not yet attended class as “spooks.” Both students

32 happen to be African Americans and are encouraged by Coleman’s colleague, Delphine Roux, to file an official complaint. As the proceedings get underway, Coleman’s wife Iris dies suddenly of a stroke, and Coleman at the time blames the “spooks” proceedings and the college more generally for her death. In this mind frame, Coleman comes to Nathan’s door in search of assistance in the spring of 1996. Coleman’s story concludes with his and Faunia’s deaths in

November of 1998.

In The Human Stain, Roth uses this narrative bedrock to establish his initial interests in and ethical concerns about the novel’s key thematics about “the human stain” and “the ecstasy of sanctimony.” In this first line of engagement, Roth complicates these key thematics in relation to enduring American problematics related to race, ethnicity, gender, and class. In Coleman’s backstory, Roth uses Coleman’s passing and the “spooks” to underline race and ethnicity as a complicating factors and problematics. When accused of racism, Coleman seeks out scapegoats for his predicament, rather than grappling with the complexity of his own racial identity. First,

Coleman turns to his black colleagues at Athena who do not come to his defense. Second, he characterizes Delphine as a revenge-seeker, motivated largely by a culture of political correctness. Third, he portrays Les as a deranged Vietnam veteran, motivated primarily by anti-

Semitism and class envy. In these ways, Roth traces an initial course or circuit through his core problematics, using his key thematics as connective tissue throughout. In Nathan’s backstory,

Roth situates Nathan’s move to Athena as an escape from his urban lifestyle and an attempt at purification, with Coleman’s interruption of Nathan’s retreat exemplifying the unpredictability of life and the attending difficulty of following through on such aspirations or designs. In the story of Coleman and Nathan’s friendship, Roth further characterizes his key thematics and core

33 problematics as Nathan discovers the complexity of his friend’s racial identity, and after his death becomes increasingly judgmental of Delphine and Les in a manner that effectively mirrors

Coleman’s earlier evaluative trajectory.

Approaching The Human Stain’s Narratorial Situation

In the already quite extensive body of criticism on The Human Stain, scholars have diverged greatly over how to approach the novel’s heterodiegetic sections. The majority of critics including Dean Franco, Derek Parker Royal, Debra Shostak, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, and

Yasmine Badir have favored a “single narrator hypothesis,” arguing that Nathan Zuckerman is the narrator of the heterodiegetic sections and all the other sections of the novel, although his role as such is revealed late in the narrative progression (chapter four). Generally, these scholars emphasize Nathan’s imaginative departures from the actual in the heterodiegetic sections and explore his possible motivations and purposes for representing events and episodes in the manner he does. More recently, scholars like Roger Edholm, Greger Andersson, and Tommy Sandberg have favored an “intermittent narrator hypothesis,” arguing that Nathan is only the narrator of the homodiegetic sections and that Roth proceeds largely via “authorial disclosure” in the heterodiegetic sections. As a consequence, these theorists generally regard the heterodiegetic sections as representing actual affairs in the narrative world and focus on Nathan Zuckerman much less in their interpretations of the novel’s thematics and its ethical purposes. While my work on the novel is indebted to these two approaches, I seek to address their individual and shared limitations through the conception of the novel’s overall narratorial situation as

“stubborn,” meaning in this context that Roth keeps both hypotheses in play through the novel’s conclusion. In short, the heterodiegetic sections are either narrated by Nathan Zuckerman and as

34 such are creatively reconstructed, or they proceed through authorial disclosure and thus represent

“fictional facts” in the narrative world.

While it may appear that I am here just combining existing approaches to cover more ground, my approach is actually responding to distinctive features of the novel that these others approaches either diminish or bracket in pursuit of a particular hypothesis. In addition, I suggest that (a) the hypothesis about stubbornness helps explain why the critics disagree about the novel as they do (the sources of the disagreement are in Roth's construction of the novel itself) and (b) that the stubbornness is not a flaw in Roth's design but something crucial to his larger ethical purposes.

In the case of the single narrator hypothesis, critics have not adequately accounted for the reader’s initial reception of the early heterodiegetic sections as representing actual affairs in the narrative world. While Nathan’s return in chapter four is a destabilizing moment in the narrative progression, the process of sorting out intratextual “fact” from “fiction” in the early heterodiegetic sections is by no means straightforward, and continues to complicate readers’ efforts to make interpretive and evaluative judgments after Nathan’s reintroduction in chapter four. Additionally, single narrator critics have largely failed to explore character-character consequences of Nathan’s unreliability, instead pursuing more general thematics about the relationship between fiction and history.

In the case of the intermittent narrator hypothesis, critics have in general worked too hard against Nathan’s reintroduction in chapter four and to some extent the ensuing series of possible metaleptic references. Edholm, for instance, strives to contextualize these narratorial gestures as primarily reflecting Roth’s general thematic interests in the process of composition and

35 authorship, and while I am persuaded that this is one possible meaning, I find myself also agreeing here with the single narrator approach, at least in that Nathan’s reintroduction is sufficient in its particular moment to invite readers into a single narrator hypothesis. Here, it is important to note that the intermittent narrator approach is part of a larger, recent (re)turn in narratological studies to an optional theory of the narrator. In response, I as a rhetorical theorist grant that authors always have the option to use or not use a narrator, but that in the case of The

Human Stain, Roth seeks to deploy both options strategically across his novel’s narrative progression towards his particular ethical purposes. Finally, in the case of both hypotheses, critics have insufficiently accounted for the continued ambiguity of Roth’s signals about the novel’s overall narratorial situation after Nathan’s return in chapter four

Establishing Narratorial Stubbornness

In the first three chapters of The Human Stain, Roth favors the intermittent narrator hypothesis. The majority of chapter one proceeds as Nathan’s first-person report, while chapters two and three appear to issue from a different narratorial source, one that initially appears to privilege accuracy and actuality. Roth first foregrounds the stubbornness of the narrative situation when he has Nathan Zuckerman return as narrator in the introductory section of chapter four (quoted below). Therein, Nathan appears to position himself as the covert narrator of the novel’s preceding heterodiegetic narrations, but never explicitly claims this role or status.

Notably, neither of the existing approaches to the novel’s narration has adequately addressed or accounted for this ambiguity. For instance, single narrator critics largely bracket signals in this section that Nathan may just be the narrator of the novel’s homodiegetic sections. On the contrary, intermittent narrator critics downplay the way this passage invites readers into the

36 possibility of Nathan’s global narratorhood via its initial possible metaleptic reference. In my approach, I highlight how the ambiguity of this passage signals Roth’s investment in both hypotheses and ultimately assists him in establishing the stubbornness of the novel’s overall narratorial situation. In the first paragraph in chapter four, Nathan reintroduces himself in this manner:

I saw Coleman alive only one more time after that July [of 1998]. He himself never told

me about the visit to the college or the phone call from the student union to his son Jeff. I

learned of his having been on the campus that day because he'd been observed there—

inadvertently, from an office window—by his former colleague Herb Keble, who, near

the end of his speech at the funeral, alluded to seeing Coleman standing hidden back

against the shadowed wall of North Hall, seemingly secreting himself for reasons that

Keble only could guess at. I knew about the phone call because Jeff Silk, whom I spoke

with after the funeral, mentioned something about it, enough for me to know that the call

had gone wildly out of Coleman's control. It was directly from Nelson Primus that I

learned of the visit that Coleman had made to the attorney's office earlier on the same day

he’d phoned Jeff and that had ended, like the other call, with Coleman lashing out in

vituperative disgust. After that, neither Primus nor Jeff Silk ever spoke to Coleman.

Coleman didn't return their calls or mine—turned out he didn't return anyone’s—and then

it seems he disconnected his answering machine, because soon enough the phone just

rang on endlessly when I tried to reach him. (202)

In support of the single narrator hypothesis, Nathan appears to refer to incidents just described in chapters two and three: Coleman’s walk across the Athena campus, his phone call to his son Jeff,

37 and his earlier visit to his lawyer Nelson Primus. In addition, Nathan is interested in documenting the sources of his information: Coleman’s colleague Herb Keble, Jeff, and Nelson accordingly. That being said, these comments only speak to the framing narrative in chapters two and three. There, the heterodiegetic narration proceeds complexly along several different trajectories. While Nathan speaks to events occurring during Coleman’s walk through campus, he does not mention anything about the more substantial portions of these chapters dedicated first to Coleman’s personal history and then to Delphine Roux’s.

Roth steers his readers more insistently towards the single narrator hypothesis in the conclusion to chapter four’s introductory homodiegetic section. There, Nathan appears to frame his narration as part of an ongoing writing project focused on Coleman’s passing and death.

Only some three months later, when I learned the secret and began this book—the book

he had asked me to write in the first place, but written not necessarily as he wanted it—

did I understand the underpinning of the pact between them [Coleman and Faunia]: he

had told her his whole story. Faunia alone knew how Coleman Silk had come about being

himself. How do I know she knew? I don’t. I couldn’t know that either. I can’t know.

Now that they’re dead, nobody can know. For better or worse, I can only do what

everyone does who thinks they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happens to be

what I do for a living. It is my job. It’s now all I do. (213)

Notably, Roth uses this passage to make the novel’s first possible metaleptic reference, “this book,” but with Nathan immediately qualifying that reference in terms of Coleman’s initial request that Nathan write his story and apology. In addition, Nathan appears to outline something essential about his literary method: Where he does not know, he is “forced to imagine.” Despite

38 initial ambiguities, the homodiegetic section in chapter four facilitates a relatively smooth transition from the intermittent narrator hypothesis to the single narrator hypothesis, as evidenced by the majority of the critical literature on the novel. Despite the section break between this homodiegetic section and the heterodiegetic sections that follows, most readers here regard Nathan’s statements “I imagine….It is my job. It’s now all I do” as applicable to the long heterodiegetic section that follow the break, which concludes chapter four. According to this logic, Nathan first outlines his literary method, and then he puts it into practice in the concluding sections of chapter four. There, the narration focuses in on Les Farley, Delphine Roux, and

Faunia Farley on the days leading up to Faunia and Coleman’s deaths in early November of

1998. In this context, readers’ interests come to focus on Nathan’s possible motivations, purposes, and methods for representing their stories in the way he does and the epistemological and ethical controversies that result.

In establishing the narratorial stubbornness, Roth relies on several intersecting processes and readerly engagements in the novel’s final chapter: (1) the gradual destabilization of the novel’s possible metaleptic series of references; (2) the alignment of the single narrator hypothesis with a metaleptic hypothesis about the equivalence between Nathan’s manuscript and the book that readers hold in their hands; (3) the complication of that alignment when revealing in the novel’s concluding scene that Nathan’s manuscript is incomplete, thus, suggesting that

Nathan's Human Stain is a work-in-progress within Roth's Human Stain; (4) the insistent ambiguity of other markers and signals about the novel’s narratorial situation; and (5) the ethical processes resulting from the stubbornness of the heterodiegetic sections. First, while Roth introduces into the homodiegetic sections of chapters four and five a series of possible metaleptic

39 references, these references are ambiguous and underdetermined and therefore do not necessarily specify equivalence between Nathan’s manuscript and Roth's novel. In the above passage which includes the initial reference of this sort, “this book” is immediately qualified as “the book he had asked me to write in the first place, but written not necessarily as he wanted it” (213). While this qualification does not entirely preclude the possibility of the metalepsis, here referring to the ontological breakdown between diegetic levels or between the telling and the told, it does serve to caution readers against prematurely assigning metalepsis in this instance, even as the suggestion of metalepsis serves Roth in reinforcing the single narrator hypothesis for the time being. In chapter five, Nathan again uses the phrase “this book.” At Coleman’s funeral, his daughter Lisa asks Nathan, “Did [Coleman] go mad?” and “[H]ow could all this happen?”

Nathan reports, “When I didn’t answer (how could I, other than by beginning to write this book), her arms dropped slowly away from me…” (304). Here, metalepsis seems more plausible given the absence of an immediate qualification, but more implicitly, this absence also limits readers’ ability to specify its scope. For instance, if metalepsis is occurring, then what part of Roth’s manuscript corresponds to Nathan’s? Its entirety or just particular sections in which the references occur?

Importantly, Roth keeps these matters ambiguous—not adding further specification elsewhere in the homodiegetic sections—in an effort to reinforce the essential ambiguity of the references, of the signals or markers related to them, and of the narratorial situation of the heterodiegetic sections more generally. While the possible metaleptic series includes other variants of the basic deictic phrase, “this book,” its most impactful entry comes late in the novel’s final chapter. There, Nathan and Les Farley have a face-to-face encounter in February of

1999, three months after Coleman and Faunia’s deaths. When conversing with Les, Nathan reveals that he is at work on a manuscript “about people like you [Les]” and that its tentative title is “The Human Stain” (356). Here, readers already disposed towards metalepsis have regarded the explicit use of the title of Roth’s novel as the title of Nathan’s manuscript as definitive evidence of a strong or close equivalence between Nathan’s manuscript and the one they hold in their hands. And if this series of references were the only factor in the determination, I would be inclined to agree with them, but notably Roth uses several other competing processes to complicate this close equivalence and in doing so proceeds towards narratorial stubbornness.

Second, as is evidenced in much of the existing criticism on The Human Stain, metalepsis proves central to the case that Nathan Zuckerman is the single, global narrator of Roth’s novel.

For Franco, Shostak, and others, while Nathan’s return as narrator in chapter four implies narratorhood of the long heterodiegetic section in that chapter, only after the title equivalence do readers become more certain that his narratorhood includes the heterodiegetic sections in chapter one, two, and three as well. Third, while this late alignment between the single narrator hypothesis and the metaleptic hypothesis about close equivalence does prompt many readers to consider all the novel’s contents as Nathan’s imaginative reconstructions, ultimately that alignment proves unstable in Roth’s complicated rhetorical and ethical designs. Here, the logic goes: While both components of this alignment appear tenable, they mutually reinforce readers’ resolve to re-configure the novel’s heterodiegetic sections as Nathan’s imaginative reconstructions; but when one or the other appears less tenable, such a reading becomes less forceful or persuasive. While much critical attention has been paid to the title equivalence in the novel’s final pages, very little has been paid to Nathan’s words that immediately follow it.

“What’s the name of one of your books?” [Les]

“The Human Stain.” [Nathan]

“Yeah? Can I get it?”

“It’s not out yet. It’s not finished yet.” (356)

While admittedly, Nathan is savvy enough of a character to have written a manuscript in which he himself has not yet finished that manuscript, I would argue that such reasoning pushes the metaleptic hypothesis nearly to its breaking point. As Edholm argues, Roth might be equally interested here in exploring thematics about writing and authorship rather than in setting up such a close equivalence between his novel and Nathan’s manuscript. But in my approach, Roth’s logic is more porous: Having brought his readers to the point of serious consideration of the single narrator hypothesis, Roth destabilizes this hypothesis by disrupting its neat alignment with the metaleptic hypothesis about close equivalence. If the possible metaleptic series appears in hindsight more ambiguous than conclusive, what becomes of the single narrator hypothesis itself which up to this point has been significantly strengthened and expanded by the possibility of metalepsis? Here, Roth’s method lies less in the explicit proclamation of the stubbornness of the narratorial situation in the heterodiegetic sections, and is more akin to the rise and fall of two competing hypotheses, neither of which prove to be particularly definitive by the novel’s conclusion, revealing in their place a more constitutive ambiguity.

Fourth, further to that point, Roth has systematically underdetermined and/or overdetermined most of the novel’s signals or markers about the nature of its narratorial situation in the heterodiegetic sections up to this concluding moment. As we have already seen, the first three chapters appear to be narrated intermittently, but can retroactively be read equally well as

Nathan’s imaginative reconstructions. In chapter four, Nathan does appear to suggest that he is the covert narrator of chapters two and three, but when we look more closely at his introductory paragraph it reveals only references to the primary or present narrative in chapters two and three.

In the case of most of the novel’s comparable signals and markers, a similar deconstruction can be performed. Collectively, these instances raise the question: Why is Roth systematically using signals and markers that simultaneously speak to two very different narratorial situations or framings? If it is not part of Roth’s design, then something has gone wrong in the execution, rendering the novel arguably a less substantial aesthetic achievement than numerous scholarly efforts have indicated. But if it is part of Roth’s design, then it is imperative to discover its purposes and consequences.

Here, it is worth noting the ease with which Roth could have disambiguated his signals and markers. For instance, in the introduction to chapter four, Nathan could have referred explicitly to the preceding two chapters’ account of Coleman’s upbringing and maturation. Or

Roth could have qualified the possible metaleptic references in a way that would have made clear the nature and extent of the suggested equivalence. But Roth chooses not to in both cases in pursuit of a very different project and ultimately his refracted realism.

The Ethical Purposes and Consequences of Narratorial Stubbornness

In The Human Stain, Roth’s ethical purposes and consequences unfold closely in relation to the stubbornness of the novel’s overall narratorial situation. Through stubbornness, Roth creates several gray or less determinate areas within his narrative world. In contrast with the novel’s narrative bedrock, these gray areas resist readers’ attempts to reconstruct their contents and as such place significant constraints on readers’ ongoing interpretive and evaluative

43 judgments. In the first gray area, Roth problematizes chapter four’s explanation of Coleman and

Faunia’s deaths. Notably, there is little evidence outside of the novel’s heterodiegetic sections that Les Farley is Coleman and Faunia’s killer. In the second gray area, Roth complicates his readers’ understanding of the extended vignettes devoted to Les Farley, Faunia Farley, and

Delphine Roux in the heterodiegetic sections in chapters three and four. Again, are these vignettes representations of actual affairs in the narrative world, or do they include events and episodes as Nathan is “forced to imagine” them? In the third gray area, readers more generally puzzle over Nathan’s role in the novel’s telling.

In the single narrator hypothesis, Nathan is the controlling intratextual agent of narration throughout, accelerating the novel’s epistemological dynamics as readers come to regard the heterodiegetic sections as Nathan’s creative reconstructions or outright fictionalizations. In the intermittent narrator hypothesis, Nathan’s role is much less substantial, and his suspicions in the homodiegetic sections that Coleman passes primarily for individualistic reasons, that Les Farley murdered Coleman and Faunia, etc., are largely borne out by the heterodiegetic narration. In contrast, narratorial stubbornness keeps both of these hypotheses available as interpretive and evaluative frames, extending the novel’s epistemological dynamics through the ambiguity of the novel’s overall narratorial situation, while simultaneously foregrounding and interrogating the ethical consequences of configuring the narrative world in particular ways. Here, we see just how closely aligned are Roth’s realist and modernist interests in The Human Stain for while narratorial stubbornness foregrounds the ethical consequences of configuring the narrative world in particular ways, it also entails an enduring commitment to literary modernism’s epistemological concerns. Thus, Roth’s The Human Stain can be best conceived of as a

44 transitional example of refracted realism, where its principle of refraction proceeds less instrumentally as in the case of the other literary examples in this dissertation, and more through an ongoing and abiding state of tension.

As a major part of his ethical purposes, Roth uses the novel’s gray areas to distribute his key thematic interests in “the human stain” and “the ecstasy of sanctimony” complexly across the telling and the told. Roth first signals a significant investment in the thematic of “the human stain” when using it as the title for his novel. As an overarching expositional frame, the title of

“the human stain” invites readers into open-ended inquiries about the novel’s initial characterizations in relation to this phrase and its ideational implications. How do this novel’s characters embody or enact such a “human stain”? What is the nature of “the human stain”? Is it a theological, cultural, political, ethical, racial, economic, ecological concept, or does it include all of the above? But readers must wait until chapter four for the first explicit use of the phrase

“the human stain” in the novel’s text. There, Faunia Farley deploys the phrase primarily to describe humanity’s environmental footprint, and Roth uses the narrator's attending commentary to expand greatly upon this original meaning: “[W]e leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here.

Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation. It’s in everyone.

Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity?” (242).

To summarize: The concept of “the human stain” is different from the concept of

“original sin.” Whereas “origin sin” is traditionally understood as the consequence of disobedience, “the human stain” exists prior to the possibility of disobedience. In this schema, the drive towards purity becomes in effect the drive to eradicate the human stain. But also according to this schema, such efforts are bound to fail. If any hope is to be found in this schema, it appears to be in accepting the existence of the human stain, rather than futilely raging against its “[i]ndwelling.” While Roth waits until second-to-last chapter in the novel to fully articulate the concept and thematic of the “human stain,” readers at this point in the narrative progression find it readily applicable to several of the novel’s character narratives. Each major character—

Coleman, Nathan, Les, and Faunia—rages in their own particular way and with some justification against the human stain and seeks out various measures to purify themselves and/or the worlds they inhabit but their efforts only perpetuate the stain. In this way, Roth posits a complexity in this central ethical issue: Simply accepting the stain is unsatisfactory but attempting to eradicate it only spreads it.

In the introductory section of chapter one, Nathan uses a number of different phrases to describe the drive towards purification. There, Nathan himself is most vociferously raging against American puritanism as expressing itself anew during the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal in the summer of 1998. First, he describes the summer as “an enormous piety binge, a purity binge” before landing on the phrase “the ecstasy of sanctimony” to describe what Nathaniel

Hawthorne a century earlier referred to as “the persecuting spirit” (2). Conceptually, “the ecstasy of sanctimony” exists as a companion concept and thematic to the “human stain.” According to

Roth’s commentary on “the human stain” in chapter four, “sanctimony” holds out such allure

46 because of its promise to eradicate or erase an “[i]nherent” “mark,” and its allure is oftentimes so potent that it blinds its seekers to the “impurity” of their means of acquisition. Additionally,

“sanctimony” indicates an ease and a simplicity of judgment not in keeping with complexity of the novel’s core problematics and their related histories. Nonetheless, there is a certain instability in the basic vocabulary of this philosophical or post-theological schema that Roth explores and addresses through the novel’s narratorial stubbornness. If all human beings bear this particular mark or stain, then what becomes of the rhetorical and polemical distinction between “pure” and

“impure”? In other words, what does it mean to practice a morality or ethics inside the perspective of the “human stain”? Such questions trouble Roth as well as his many characters, and for Roth, the answer lies less in the clear coordination of an overarching narrative where some characters are pure and others are not, but rather in the utilization of a constitutive ambiguity that foregrounds the ethical imbrication of all his characters as well as the processual and qualified nature of readers’ ongoing interpretive and evaluative judgments. In this way,

Roth, like other authors of refracted realist narratives, emphasizes both the necessity and difficulty of ethical judgments.

In the first gray area, Roth problematizes chapter four’s explanation of Coleman and

Faunia’s deaths, using narratorial stubbornness to distribute his key thematics complexly across the novel’s telling and told. While Coleman and Faunia’s deaths in November of 1998 remain part of the novel’s narrative bedrock, narratorial stubbornness makes it very difficult to determine precisely how they died. Here, Roth uses the novel’s relative division into homodiegetic and heterodiegetic sections to great effect. In the homodiegetic sections, Roth traces the development of Nathan’s own opinions about the matter. In the homodiegetic sections

47 of chapter one, Nathan has his suspicions that Les is somehow involved. In an important passage mid-chapter, Nathan describes the conclusion of his friend’s life as a “disaster,” but without further explicating its exact nature. In chapters four and five, Nathan grows more assured that

Les Farley is the primary cause or agent behind this disaster. In the novel’s concluding scene,

Nathan confronts Les, and during their conversation decides that “here is the man who murdered

Coleman and Faunia” (350). Despite this development, Roth offers nothing close to definitive proof of Les’s involvement in the homodiegetic sections. Roth emphasizes this state of affairs in his depiction of Nathan’s visit to the local police department in chapter five. There, Nathan gathers his evidence and presents his case to the police, who dismiss him as an amateur detective and a grieving friend. In this light, Nathan himself appears to have fallen prey to “the ecstasy of sanctimony.”

While single narrator critics have generally recognized Nathan’s unreliability in the heterodiegetic sections, few have pursued the ethical or the character-character consequences of his representations and accusations. In other words, while single narrator critics agree that

Nathan goes well beyond his epistemological purview in his representations of Coleman’s passing and history, the vignettes devoted to Les Farley, Faunia, and Delphine Roux, etc., they largely contextualize these moves as part of Nathan’s artistic license, thus implicitly assuming his manuscript-in-progress is a work of fiction. But Roth has positioned the imminent publication of Nathan’s manuscript in chapter five in a way that invites readers to think further about how this manuscript might be received once distributed to other characters like Les Farley, as Nathan promises to do in the novel’s final scene. Of all the single narrator critics, Yasmine Badir alone has followed up on these invitations, exploring the ethical consequences of Nathan’s imaginative

48 departures. For Badir, representations of Les Farley and Delphine Roux in chapters two, three, and four are “caricatures” and “brutalizations” driven by Nathan’s own devotion to Coleman’s cult of personality and individuality (270). In this context, Badir questions, for example, the heterodiegetic narration’s depiction of Les as a homicidal maniac. Given that all of the novel’s concrete evidence of Les’s involvement appears in sections which Nathan imaginatively reconstructs, on what basis are readers to join Nathan in his convictions about Les’s involvement? Notably, narratorial stubbornness does not offer anything like a neat solution to these problematics. While narratorial stubbornness invites readers to consider once again that the heterodiegetic sections might indeed represent actual affairs, narratorial stubbornness at the same time prevents them from arriving at final or definitive judgments, here in stark contrast to Nathan in his homodiegetic sections.

In the novel’s second gray area, Roth complicates his readers’ understanding of the extended vignettes devoted to Faunia Farley and Delphine Roux that appear in the heterodiegetic sections in chapters three and four. In a logic virtually identical to the above treatment of Les

Farley, Roth raises questions about Nathan’s purposes and motivations in representing these women in the way he does, before using narratorial stubbornness to inject an air of contingency and provisionality into the resulting critique. In her own such critique, Badir repeats her accusation that Nathan’s representations of these women are both “caricatures” and

“brutalizations.” Focusing in particular on Nathan’s representation of Delphine, Badir argues that he is motivated by both his devotion to his dead friend and his own implicit sexism and misogyny. Given that Nathan could not possibly know all the details of Delphine’s life described in chapters three and four, Badir asks: Why then portray her as such a petty, divisive, vengeful

49 person, who seizes on Coleman’s death as an opportunity to vindicate herself? In explanation, we might look back once again to the novel’s contentious opening passage, where Nathan’s polemical target is the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal. Notably, there Nathan offers little comment on Clinton’s abuses of power and instead appears to defend Clinton against all his critics, concluding the passage with an image of “a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a

Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other bearing the legend A HUMAN

BEING LIVES HERE” (3). As such, Roth does not limit Nathan’s unreliability to the heterodiegetic sections and uses moments like this to prepare his readers implicitly for a similar gender politics operative within the extended studies of characters like Delphine Roux and

Faunia Farley. And yet, narratorial stubbornness ultimately results in the preceding critique as just one possible interpretive and evaluative frame in the larger scheme of things. In the refracted realist logic of the novel, chapter four may in fact describe events as they actually have occurred.

In this way, Roth asks his readers to proceed with caution, lest they fall into interpretive and evaluative reductions or simplifications like so many of the novel’s characters do.

In the third gray area, readers more generally puzzle over Nathan’s narratorial role. In the critical discussion devoted the novel’s distinctive telling, scholars have emphasized Roth’s abiding interest in thematics pertaining to the relationship between fact and fiction, and history and story. In the intermittent narrator approach, critics like Edholm minimize Nathan’s narratorial role to the homodiegetic sections and consider him as an observant and reliable narrator whose suspicions throughout the homodiegetic sections are borne out by the “eye- witness” testimony offered in the omniscient narration of the heterodiegetic sections. In this way,

Nathan himself largely avoids falling prey to “the sanctimony of ecstasy.” Consequently,

Edholm limits Roth’s thematics about the relationship between fact and fiction primarily to the novel’s told. In Edholm’s approach, Roth positions Nathan as “someone telling a story,” although notably not the stories that appear in the heterodiegetic sections. For Edholm, Roth generates through the alteration between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration a polyphony of voices that nonetheless builds towards a definitive and accurate version of the narrative world.

By contrast, single narrator critics maximize Nathan’s narratorial role in both the homodiegetic and the heterodiegetic sections, and have emphasized his imaginative departures and his unreliability throughout the heterodiegetic sections. While critics like Franco and Shostak highlight the complex relationship between fact and fiction in Nathan’s telling, lack of attention to character-character consequences of Nathan’s imaginative departures have resulted in only the most general observations about the ethical consequences of his unreliability. By contrast, my approach recognizes a much richer complexity within Roth’s thematics about fact and fiction, and history and story. In light of narratorial stubbornness, Roth’s readers must grapple with two competing versions of the novel’s narrative world, and while the narrative bedrock makes some interpretive and evaluative judgement possible, the novel’s gray areas including the nature of

Coleman’s death and of Delphine’s actions after his death remain difficult to determine. In this way, the dynamic between intratextual fact and fiction changes depending upon which narratorial hypothesis one is currently favoring, a process which Roth uses expertly to foreground the ethical stakes of configuring the narrative world in particular ways.

At the foundation of The Human Stain’s rhetorical and ethical project lies a mode of judgment at the blurry intersection between epistemology and ethics. Roth builds into the novel’s rhetorical and ethical design an opportunity for his readers to practice a mode of judgment at

51 once more refracted and contextual than the modes increasingly relied on by characters across the novel’s narrative progression. Admittedly, Roth takes a great risk in concluding his novel in narratorial stubbornness. Stubbornness involves Roth giving up a certain amount of control over the kinds of interpretive and ethical judgments his readers derive through the novel’s alternations between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration. And yet, Roth turns this possible deficiency into one of his novel’s greatest strengths. In the face of mounting pressures from Nathan and the complicated narratorial dynamics across the novel’s narrative progression, Roth invites his readers to explore the ethical consequences of configuring the narrative world in particular ways, but more importantly gives his readers the opportunity to experience the refracted and contextual nature of their own interpretations and evaluations.

Conclusion

In The Human Stain, Roth uses narratorial stubbornness to respond to ongoing social, cultural, and ideological problematics in American life and society in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. In the novel’s opening passage, Roth takes the controversies over political correctness in American politics, academic life, popular media, and work culture as a primary point of departure, using his key thematics about “the human stain” and “the ecstasy of sanctimony” to explore a crucial tension at work therein. By political correctness, I am speaking here broadly of a movement within a variety of different American institutions during the 1980s and 1990s away from forms of expression (image, language) and action (behavior, speech) that exclude, marginalize, or insult groups that are socially, economically, and politically disadvantaged or discriminated against. In the twentieth century, Old-Left Stalinists used the term “political correct” to describe orthodox thought and behavior. In the 1970s, the New Left

52 used the term “political correctness” ironically and self-deprecatingly. Then during the culture wars of the 1980s, American conservatives used the term as a weapon against the New Left and only then did progressives rise to its defense. In this final context, conservative writer Allan

Bloom famously likened “political correctness” to “the closing of the American mind.” While

Nathan Zuckerman throughout the novel is critical of political correctness, Roth notably uses several tactics to inject distance between Nathan’s opinions and Coleman’s even stronger criticism on the one hand and his own interpretive and evaluative judgements on the other hand.

First, Roth in The Human Stain seeks to contextualize current controversies about political correctness in relation to more nuanced, detailed, and extended histories of race, politics, and ideology in both US and European contexts. In this process, Roth pushes against summary dismissals of political correctness by attesting to the very complicated and oftentimes divisive histories that have informed both its emergence and predominance in contemporary culture. At the same time, Roth uses his key thematics to link these more recent developments to the ongoing struggle against racism, sexism, misogyny, and classism across the novel’s distinctive histories and geographies.

Second, Roth uses the particular dynamics and details of the “spooks” incident to complicate both Nathan’s and Coleman’s interpretations and evaluations of political correctness.

In Coleman’s perspective, the “spooks” incident very much signals something like the “closing of the American mind.” Nathan, in his more reportorial mode, questions some of Coleman’s more vehement criticisms, but by and large believes political correctness to be a step backwards rather than a step forwards as evidenced in his opening monologue. By contrast, the dynamics and details of the “spooks” incident and the subsequent investigation complicate these critiques

53 as well as gesture more generally towards the divisive problematics and histories foregrounded throughout the narrative. For instance, Coleman, who is passing as a white man, is outraged that his black colleagues think that he is a racist, but he cannot appeal to his birth identity in an effort to exonerate himself without further complicating his credibility. Here, Roth uses these compounding ironies in Coleman’s situation to break down the binary oppositions on which both his and Nathan’s critiques implicitly and explicitly depend.

Third, Roth uses narratorial stubbornness to further complicate Coleman’s and Nathan’s critiques of political correctness. In the intermittent narrator hypothesis, the heterodiegetic sections represent actual affairs and show Delphine Roux, for instance, strategically redeploying her political and ideological investments for personal gain. In the single narrator hypothesis,

Nathan imagines Delphine as such and in so doing evidences biases and prejudices that the new forms of expression and action seek to combat. But through narratorial stubbornness, Roth discourages his readers from regarding one hypothesis over the other as most representative of the novel’s political and cultural moment. Rather, in the imaginative space afforded through stubbornness and the novel in general, both hypotheses have their applicability and significance.

In this way, Roth uses narratorial stubbornness to point to the gap between what occurs in the heterodiegetic sections and what Nathan believes about political correctness in the homodiegetic sections. Whether the heterodiegetic sections depict actual affairs or whether they are Nathan’s imaginative reconstructions, Roth positions Nathan as at an epistemological remove. In other words, regardless of the hypothesis in question, Nathan arrives at his conclusions about political correctness through inference and speculation, that is through a logical and imaginative exercise.

By contrast, the novel’s refracted realism allows Roth’s readers the opportunity to pause and

54 survey the gap between the “evidence” on the one hand and their own interpretive and evaluative judgements on the other hand. In this process, the nature of the sources of particular pieces of information becomes arguably more important than the information itself, and when the source is ambiguous, Roth suggests, we need to contextualize the conclusions we derive.

As a work of refracted realism, The Human Stain foregrounds the mimetic and thematic components and relatively backgrounds the synthetic component in its narrative designs and rhetorical interactions. More to the point, Roth, regardless of which narratorial hypothesis is operative at a particular point in the novel’s narrative progression, emphasizes his characters’ status as possible persons and the narrative world’s minimal departure from the extratextual world. With this foundation in place, Roth then moves towards different thematic interests made possible through the mimetic illusion, although importantly he is not limited to the mimetic component as a source for thematizing. Roth uses the stubborn nature of the novel’s narratorial situation to induce significant tension between the novel’s mimetic and synthetic components in order to explore related thematics and ethical problematics, and then uses this tension as an additional source of thematizing.

But importantly, narratorial stubbornness entails a continued focus on epistemological concerns that works somewhat contrary to the more instrumental model of refraction evident in my project’s other examples of refracted realism. In other words, given that readers cannot determine the exact nature of the novel’s overall narratorial situation, aspects of the narrative world remain open to interpretation and evaluation through the novel’s conclusion in a manner highly reminiscent of more open-ended modernist novels. For this reason, I conceptualize Roth’s

The Human Stain as involving a more complementary relationship between its realist and

55 modernist interests, where refraction proceeds less instrumentally and more through an ongoing, reinforcing tension or dynamic. In this process, the novel’s synthetic component takes on increasing importance across the narrative progression as narratorial stubbornness becomes more readily apparent. And yet, Roth’s aims in deploying stubbornness are not to render the narrative world epistemologically indeterminate or ontologically plural, but rather to heighten readers’ awareness of what the ethical stakes are in the told and the telling. At the intersection between the novel’s epistemology and ethics, readers experience complexly both the need and desirability of arriving at ethical judgments about the novel’s gray or less determinate areas, but also the profound difficulty of doing so given the novel’s shifting narratorial dynamics.

Chapter 3: Cole’s Refracted Realism in Open City:

Rhetorical Seduction, Delayed Disclosure, Ethical Consequences

Introduction: Open City’s Refracted Realism

In his 2010 novel Open City, Teju Cole closely follows his narrator Julius, a Nigerian expatriate and psychiatrist-in-residency, on his long and sometimes aimless walks through New

York City in late 2006 and early 2007. In the first twenty chapters of the novel, Cole portrays

Julius as an empathetic friend, a dedicated and caring practitioner, a gifted historian and theorist, and a sensitive and insightful aesthete. Therein, Julius engages in extensive meditations and reflections about history, trauma, psychology, commerce, art, and music, with the resulting narrations reminding many readers of the works of W. G. Sebald. But in the novel’s penultimate chapter, Cole reveals that Julius, when he was 15, assaulted and raped a family friend and thus ushers in a complex and multilayered ethical critique of Julius as character and narrator, a critique that influences readers' assessments of his theoretical positions. Central to this critique is

Julius’s notions of the “opacity” of the human mind and a “blind spot” at the heart of consciousness, explored periodically throughout the novel but in greatest detail in the penultimate chapter. There, Julius attends a party at the invitation of Moji, an old acquaintance from Nigeria. Over drinks, Julius gives another party guest “an account of” his “evolving view of psychiatric practice” (238): “[W]hat are we to do when the lens through which the symptoms are viewed is often, itself, symptomatic: the mind is opaque to itself, and it’s hard to tell where,

57 precisely, these areas of opacity are. Ophthalmic science describes an area at the back of the bulb of the eye, the optic disk, where the million or so ganglia of the optic nerve exit the eye. It is precisely there, where too many of the neurons associated with vision are clustered, that the vision goes dead. For so long, I recall explaining to my friend that day, I have felt that most of the work of psychiatrists in particular, and mental health professionals in general, was a blind spot so broad that it had taken over most of the eye.” (238-39). Here, Julius weaves together insights from a variety of different disciplines (photography, critical theory, epistemology, anatomy, ophthalmology, optics, and psychiatry) to arrive at his most succinct expression of his theory of “opacity” and the “blind spot.”

Under the sway of the novel’s initial rhetorical alignments, these observations emerge as fairly uncontroversial, and continue to contribute to Julius’s self-presentation as an ethically- engaged practitioner and researcher. But when Moji accuses Julius of assault and rape later in the same chapter, Cole offers up Julius as an unwitting example of his own theory and thus complexly highlights the attractions, limitations, and dangers associated with Julius’s various theoretical positions and more implicitly his reliance on modernist and postmodernist literary tropes and devices. In particular, Cole uses the novel’s “delayed disclosure” to chip away at the notion that theory is ahistorical and thus its valid positions can have some sort of universal reach and applicability regardless of context or situation. Rather, the novel’s sophisticated apparatus of configuration and reconfiguration suggests that theoretical positions do not have intrinsic value but rather they accrue value slowly and complexly through conceptualization, use, and redeployment. For Cole, theory is a constant act of negotiation and renegotiation depending upon the contexts, purposes, and consequences of any particular conceptualization, utilization, and

58 application. In addition, Cole uses his novel’s delayed disclosure and related narrative and rhetorical strategies to include his authorial readers inside Julius's “blind spot” for the duration of the “rhetorical seduction” in the first twenty chapters. In this process, Cole asks his authorial readers to think about their own willingness to translate particular social and cultural markers— for instance, Julius’s aesthetic sensibilities, his cosmopolitanism, his Ivy League education, and his affluence and professional class—into a positive ethical valuation of his character and narration. In part, this willingness is produced through the craft and efficiency of Cole’s narrative design. But in part, it becomes possible only through readers’ own presuppositions, biases, and inferences about such markers and attending practices. Julius’s high degree of narrative sophistication, his apparent ethical engagements, and his love for classical art, philosophy, and music make it easier for many readers to buy into his self-presentation, but Cole’s skillful handling of the narrative progression ultimately reveals the deficiency in this kind of reasoning: one that readily or rather automatically translates such markers and practices into ethical value or currency.

In this chapter, I argue that Cole uses the complexities and dynamism in Julius’s narration—its paradoxical paralipsis, rhetorical seduction, unreliability, delayed disclosure, ethical critique and reconfiguration—to generate a distinctive mode of realistic representation I am describing as “refracted realism.” As a work of refracted realism, Open City foregrounds the mimetic and thematic components and relatively backgrounds the synthetic component in its narrative designs and rhetorical interactions. More to the point, Cole is generally interested in representing his characters as “possible people” and in “the narrative world as one like our own, that is, hypothetically or conceptually possible and still compatible with the laws and limitations

59 that govern the extratextual world” (Phelan and Rabinowitz, Narrative Theory 7). Furthermore, he uses these representations to explore a variety of different thematics about aesthetics, political and cultural history, cosmopolitanism, psychology, epistemology, and trauma. That being said,

Cole increasingly makes transparent the novel’s synthetic component in its final chapters. There, some readers recognize Julius’s “improbable lack of knowledge” of Moji’s accusations prior to the delayed disclosure. Presented with two possible explanations for this lack of knowledge or

“paradoxical paralipsis”—either Julius has willfully suppressed this event in order to manipulate his narratee, or Cole has collapsed the temporal distance between the narrating Julius and his experiencing counterpart in order to immerse his readers in Julius’s confident estimation of his own character and ethics prior to the delayed disclosure. In my view, Cole skillfully guides his readers towards the second interpretation. As a result, the contrast between Julius’s uses and redeployments of theory prior to Moji’s accusations and then after those accusations is all the more poignant, and frees Cole from unnecessarily repudiating or rejecting all of Julius’s aesthetic engagements and theoretical investments.

In addition, Cole uses the complexities and dynamism within Julius’s narration— its paradoxical paralipsis, rhetorical seduction, unreliability, delayed disclosure, ethical critique and reconfiguration—to move his readers through different conceptions of the overall purpose of the novel and different perceptions or impressions about its aesthetic dominant. Through the novel’s paradoxical paralipsis and rhetorical seduction, Cole cultivates the initial perception that his project is a neo-modernist epistemological experiment focused on Julius’s gifted skills of narration, theorization, and analysis. In this initial rhetorical alignment, authorial readers perceive a close kinship between Julius and the implied Cole to the extent that Cole appears to

60 share his own skills of narration, theorization, and analysis with his narrator Julius. In this initial reception, Julius comes across as an empathetic friend, a dedicated and caring practitioner, a sensitive and insightful aesthete, and a gifted historian and theorist. When he explicitly theorizes the nature of consciousness, aesthetic engagement, and traumatic experience, most first-time readers receive his efforts without registering a hint of irony. Julius’s seriousness, personal history, academic interests, professional training, historical awareness, and aesthetic sensitivity allow him to “estrange” the worlds he walks through, seeing them freshly from a knowledgeable and empathetic perspective. Thus, Julius proceeds through his world much like a flaneur, but unlike earlier counterparts he foregrounds issues related to racial equality, economical inequity, and postcolonialism in his ongoing commentaries. Characteristically, Julius finds himself drawn to and drawn into instances and experiences of epistemological confusion and/or breakdown. In his narration, Julius focuses on instances and experiences where the past and the present blur, where the real and the fictional blend, and where the personal and historical coalesce as he seeks to make comprehensible the forces that both bind and divide the “palimpsest” of the contemporary global city. But Cole uses the novel’s delayed disclosure to interrupt this initial perception of the novel’s project and aesthetic dominant. In the novel’s penultimate chapter,

Cole’s readers grapple with the depth and extent of Julius’s unreliability and ethical deficiencies and embark on a multilayered interpretive and evaluative critique of Julius as character and narrator and his theoretical positions. After the delayed disclosure, Cole’s refracted realism as well as its ethical aesthetic dominant become much more evident. Moji’s revelations activate and intensify the novel’s already significant ethical engagements and transform Julius into a

61 profound and egregious exemplar of the epistemological “opacity” that he himself theorizes in his late “account” of the nature of consciousness.

Establishing the Rhetorical Seduction

In describing Julius’s narration in the first twenty chapters as a “rhetorical seduction,” I am referring primarily to the way Cole uses Julius as character and narrator therein to communicate to his readers an apparent set of ethical values and commitments in order to invite those same readers in a close alignment with his interests, experiences, interpretations, and evaluations during the narrative’s “beginning” and “middle.” James Phelan uses the term

“rhetorical seduction” to describe the narration of Humbert Humbert primarily in part one of

Nabokov’s Lolita (Reading the American Novel: 1920-2010 176). There, Nabokov relies on

Humbert’s eloquence, word play, obvious erudition, and aestheticism to soften the initial impact of the character's ethical deficiencies. But in applying the term to Open City, I am highlighting a stronger or more comprehensive case. In Lolita, readers become very much aware of Humbert’s ethical deficiencies in the first few chapters. There it is established that he is a pedophile, has violated children in the past, and is comfortable continuing to do so in his present, although there are also some indications in the ongoing narration of possible remorse and reevaluation. By contrast, Cole offers his readers little to no direct evidence of Julius’s violation and rape of Moji throughout the first twenty chapters of the novel. As I will explore in a later section, Cole does subtly prepare the way for the delayed disclosure through his description of increasingly problematic events and experiences in Julius’s past and present, but there I will argue that these

“clues” or “signals” complicate rather than topple Julius’s initial character composite and apparent ethics. For these reasons, Julius’s rhetorical seduction in Open City is more total or

62 comprehensive, thus enabling a deeper immersion in his worldview and theoretical explorations and positions that is integral for the novel’s complex ethical purposes and multilayered critique.

For instance, if Cole were to definitively indicate to his readers early on Julius’s violation and rape of Moji, that would significantly impact or alter their ability to immerse themselves in and take seriously the various theoretical projects he entertains.

Julius’s initial character composite and apparent ethics proceeds along two interrelated tracks: Julius as narrator and Julius as character within those narrations. In the initial reading of the novel, most readers experience little divergence or dissonance between the experiencing and narrating Julius. In the absence of the novel’s delayed disclosure, Cole’s readers combine these two tracks to form an initial composite of Julius and his apparent ethics. In retrospect—after the delayed disclosure and after recognizing the paradoxical paralipsis—Cole’s readers realize that the first twenty chapters offered them a version of Julius that is very close to his own perceptions of himself during the narrated time period, but one not representative of the complete picture that

Cole uses Moji to fill out. By the beginning of the novel’s narrated action, Julius has completely suppressed all knowledge of Moji’s violation and rape, and thus from his perspective, his apparent ethics are his actual ethics, unsullied by past crimes and ethical deficiencies. But in the novel’s “beginning” and “middle,” readers are not privy to this knowledge, and thus largely take

Julius at his word. In this context, as I've noted above, Julius represents himself as an empathetic friend, a dedicated and caring practitioner, and a sensitive and insightful aesthete.

Simultaneously, Julius uses his narration to establish initial impressions about his academic background and his theoretical interests, using them to subtly reinforce his apparent ethics.

In the novel’s first chapters, Cole uses many different incidents to shine a positive light on Julius’s ethical character. Here, I will dwell on one representative example. In chapter two,

Julius offers his initial representation of himself as a psychiatrist and a professional. But rather than focusing on his specific, in-clinic care of patients, Julius describes how his patients’ conditions and welfare haunt him frequently while he is engaged in activities outside of work.

While waiting to see a movie, Julius wanders into a bookstore. As he peruses the shelves, he thinks about his long-term patient “V.” Here, he abbreviates the patient’s name in his reminiscences ostensibly to preserve her anonymity—a move that further reinforces Julius’s kind of practice and his commitment to professional and medical ethics. V., Julius reflects in his backstory, recently wrote an award-winning book, “The Monster of New Amsterdam,” on

Cornelis Van Tienhoven, “a seventeenth-century schout of New Amsterdam, officially empowered to enforce the law among Dutch colonists of Manhattan Island” (25-26). As the title indicates, Van Tienhoven led brutal raids on the local indigenous populations, acting as “head of a party of men that murdered over a hundred innocent members of the Hackensack tribe” (26).

Julius recalls while searching the shelves for her volume the impact that this project had on his patient: “V.’s depression was partly due to the emotional toll of these studies, which she once described as looking out across a river on a day of heavy rain, so that she couldn’t be sure whether the activity on the opposite bank had anything to do with her, or whether, there was any activity at all” (26-27). Once Julius finds her book, he decides to purchase it not only to enrich his own knowledge about Van Tienhoven and the Dutch history of Manhattan but also in an effort to better understand and care for his patient: “I knew I would not have time to read all of it, but I wanted to think more about what she had written, and I also hoped that the book might, in

64 those moments when it left the strict historical record and betrayed some subjective analysis, give me further insight into her psychological state” (27). In this way, Cole positions Julius as a dedicated and caring practitioner and professional who continues to think about his patients long after his sessions with them have concluded, thus shining a positive light on Julius’s ethical character.

In the novel’s introductory chapters, Julius’s narration indicates a great deal about his academic background and theoretical interests, which in turn subtly reinforces his apparent ethics or ethical composite. By training, Julius is a doctor and psychiatrist, but his narration indicates much broader educational aspirations and academic engagements. In chapter one, Julius represents these aspirations as beginning during his undergraduate studies or earlier. In addition to a pre-medicine curriculum, Julius spent much of his time as an undergraduate studying literature, art, and philosophy. And as Julius’s narration indicates, he continues to develop his

“liberal arts” education during the decade which he dedicates to attaining his professional degrees and certifications. In the novel’s first chapters, Julius’s narration demonstrates wide reading on diverse subjects including music, art, photography, history, cultural studies, critical theory, and philosophy in addition to psychology and psychiatry—his chosen fields. In this way,

Julius represents himself as something of a perpetual student, open to new lines of inquiry and analysis. As he observes late in the novel, his professors at medical school and during his residency in psychiatry highly discouraged engaging with “non-evidence-based” theories of the mind and human consciousness, but Julius indicates that he at the time of narration continues to find it necessary to consider such theories given what he characterizes as the “opacity” of the mind.

From this broad reading emerge several other theoretical interests. First and foremost,

Julius is interested in issues pertaining to epistemology: the acquisition of knowledge, the function of memory, and the confusion or breakdown of epistemological processes. When describing his walks through the City, Julius likes to dwell in particular on his own epistemological processes and experiences of confusion and near-breakdown. For instance, while observing the flight of birds in one of the first paragraphs of the novel, Julius notes: “I doubted in some part of myself whether these birds, with their dark wings and throats, their pale bodies and tireless little hearts, really did exist. So amazed was I by them that I couldn’t trust my memory when they weren’t there” (4). Here, in the face of the mysteries of the human mind and cognition, Julius launches into a characteristic poetical evocation which appears to blend the

Romanticism of his musical and artistic tastes with the poststructuralism of his critical interests.

Notably, Cole uses this and many like instances to offer the initial perception of his novel as a neo-modernist epistemological experiment. Second, Julius is interested in the history contained within the places and monuments of the City and in the other locations visited either in narrated action or in reminiscence. In his narration, he uses the histories emanating from places and objects to complicate or subvert the conventional or normative histories of New York City as a global, capitalist center. Through these more punctual engagements, Julius gains access to the historical layers obscured by these dominant narratives and to historical experiences of those persons and populations lost in the shuffle. Third, Julius is interested in these persons’ and populations’ experiences of trauma, violence, oppression, murder, and rape as an important and integral part of the historical record. At his most expansive, Julius suggests with his patient V. that the history of New York City is the history of these oftentimes suppressed or forgotten

66 experiences. In this aspect of Julius’s narration, he closely aligns his apparent ethics with these convictions and to his narrative’s own processes of recovery and representation.

Fourth, Julius is interested in aesthetics and artistic expression. Here, he combines his interests in epistemology, history, and trauma to arrive at an aesthetic that is at once deeply

Romantic and modernist. Julius subscribes to the notion of “the great work of art” but relates to

“the masterpiece” less as an expression of an individual genius and more as an autonomous aesthetic object or world. While Julius is interested in the history of particular artists and objects, his aesthetic language is laden with terms like “drawing in,” “immersion,” “flight,” and “escape” that appear closely aligned with his philosophical convictions about the power of places and objects he engages with across the City. In the novel’s initial chapters, Cole uses these impressions of Julius’s education and his theoretical interests in his narration to subtly reinforce

Julius’s apparent ethics. As a character, Julius shows himself to be a good friend, caring professional, and sensitive aesthete. As a narrator, Julius demonstrates a great deal of learning, a range of interpretive foci and methods, and an underlining ethical engagement with people, places, and objects. In this context, Julius’s digressive and associational mode comes across as an integral part of his interpretive and evaluative practices. Rather than jumping to a conclusion or rushing to a systemic account, Julius proceeds cautiously through the layers of the mind, history, trauma, and aesthetic experience.

Paradoxical Paralipsis

Cole’s use of paradoxical paralipsis in Open City is quite different from many existing examples in modern and contemporary American fiction, and Cole uses this difference in the direct service of his multilayered ethical critiques of Julius’s theoretical positions. In Narrative

Discourse, Gèrard Genette uses the rhetorical term “paralipsis” to describe instances in Proust, where his narrator implausibly “giv[es] less information than is necessary in principle in the code of focalization governing the whole” (195). James Phelan has studied several instances of what he describes as “paradoxical paralipsis” “where the narrator’s withholding of information seems to violate conventional mimesis but is nevertheless effective within the larger narrative” (Living to Tell about It 35n4). Phelan differentiates between “paradoxical paralipsis” and “elliptical narration, that is, telling that leaves a gap that the narrator and the implied author expect to their respective audiences to be able to fill” (50). In Open City as in Phelan’s example of Ernest

Hemingway’s “My Old Man,” the paralipsis’s paradoxical quality emerges from the differential between the progression of character development and the progression of the narration. By the end of Open City’s sequence of events, the character Julius is in full possession of knowledge of

Moji’s accusations and yet in Julius’s retrospective narration Cole strategically suppresses or brackets any knowledge of her accusations. Comparably, Hemingway in “My Old Man” suppresses his narrator’s knowledge of the short story’s concluding revelation about Joe Butler's judgment of his father in order to foreground his experiences leading up to and arriving at that moment. In this way, both narrators can be said to lack what Phelan describes as complete

“aesthetic control” over their narrative (104-6). Julius may be relying on his extensive knowledge and gifts of articulation when narrating his past experiences, but he is not shaping that narration for some kind of final publication nor does he possess the capacity to write himself out of his own epistemological and ethical “opacity.” Throughout the novel, Julius functions as an exemplar of “opacity” even in the final chapter after Moji’s revelatory confrontation. But where Cole’s Julius and Hemingway’s Joe Butler are noticeably different is in terms of self-

68 awareness. In contrast to Hemingway’s narrator Joe, who is still a young man, relatively uneducated, and plainspoken, Julius is a grown man, is highly educated, and narrates with great sophistication. Thus, whereas it is rather implausible to think that Joe has willfully constructed his narration to suppress his knowledge of the story’s late revelation, Julius, being who he is and knowing what he does in coordination with the nature of Moji’s delayed disclosure, could have plausibly suppressed his knowledge of his crimes and ethical deficiencies in his narration in order to deliberately manipulate or deceive his narratee.

That being said, there is a long history in the novel of using first-person narrator who at the beginning of the narration implausibly lacks knowledge of their ultimate fate or moral/ethical transformation described usually much later in such narratives. In such cases, authors have relied on one or more of what Phelan has described as “the five Rules and two Meta-Rules of Thumb

(that is, tendencies or even conventions but not laws) about Readerly Engagement with Breaks from the Dominant System of Probability: (1) The Rule of Duration, (2) The Rule of Partial

Continuity, (3) The Rule of Self-Assurance, (4) The Rule of Temporal Decoding, (5) the Rule of

Extraordinary Revelation, (6) The Meta-Rule of Dominant Focus, and (7) The Meta Rule of

Value Added” (Somebody Telling Somebody Else 47-49). Cole’s use of paradoxical paralipsis relies on the “Rules” of partial continuity, self-assurance, and extraordinary revelation and on both “Meta-Rules.” The resulting break of the mimetic code is limited to just this one aspect of his narration and thus is an instance of “partial continuity.” Julius’s knowledge and eloquence combine to suggest a great deal of “confidence” in himself and his apparent ethics. The break involves an “extraordinary revelation” about Julius’s character and history in the penultimate chapter which Cole uses to usher in the novel’s extensive reconfiguration. In Open City, Cole’s

“dominant focus” is primarily on its exploration of Julius’s character and ideas. This focus overwhelms the break in the mimetic code even as it reinforces the ethical dominant and makes the novel’s refracted realism more fully visible. And finally, the “value added” lies in no small part in the novel’s multilayered critique of Julius’s character, act of narration, and theoretical positions. Through “paradoxical paralipsis,” Cole’s readers experience the attractions, limitations, and dangers of his theoretical positions through their close encounter and extended rhetorical alignment with the novel’s ethically deficient narrator. Then through extraordinary revelation, Cole’s readers come to grapple with their own presuppositions, biases, and inferences, particularly in relation to Julius’s education and professional training, his affluence and class, and his apparent ethical engagements.

Delayed Disclosure

The novel’s delayed disclosure of Julius’s crimes and ethical deficiencies occurs in chapter twenty, the novel’s penultimate chapter. There, after a party, Moji confronts Julius, accusing him of raping her in Nigeria when she was 15 and he was 14. Julius first introduces

Moji’s character in the first chapter in the second part of the novel. Early in 2007, Julius is grocery shopping when he notices a striking Yoruba woman approaching him. When Julius does not recognize her, Moji chides him and introduces herself formally: “Moji Kasali.” At this point,

Julius remembers her as “the older sister (by one year) of a school friend, Dayo. I had met two to three times in Lagos, when on school breaks I would visit Dayo at home” (156). Through further conversation, Julius learns that she is now “an investment banker at Lehman Brothers” (158) and discovers a little more about his friend Dayo who went to England for graduate school before returning to Nigeria. When their conversation draws to a close, they exchange information and

Moji assures Julius that he would hear from her again (159). Moji then appears in several subsequent scenes in the second part of the novel, each time presented by Julius as an old acquaintance, a developing friend, and a possible love interest. In chapter seventeen, Moji joins

Julius and his friends for a picnic in Central Park in the early spring of 2007. Julius recalls that

Moji brought a copy of Anna Karenina with her to the park and that “she leaned on her elbow and read from the thick volume—it was one of the new translations—only occasionally interrupting herself to participate in conversation” (194). When Moji does speak up, she argues passionately about climate change and “the racist structure” of US society and politics. While

Julius is mildly annoyed by what he regards as Moji’s “brittleness” and “defensiveness,” he also finds himself strangely attracted to Moji. Observing her more closely, Julius notes that he “found her puzzling. She was too tall, and her eyes were small. Her face was dark, so dark that it had faint purple notes in it, but she was not beautiful in the way I expected dark women to be” (198).

But at the same time, he finds himself “suddenly imagin[ing]” he and Moji “together in a sexual situation. She was no Nadege [Julius’s recent girlfriend]; this attraction was of different valency.

I wasn’t even certain I could term it attraction. But there was something interesting in the mood she gathered around her like a robe” (203). In retrospect, it is notable just how thick or resilient the paradoxical paralipsis is in such instances. Here, the narrating Julius focuses almost exclusively on the experiencing Julius’s moment-by-moment sensations and perceptions in the narrated frame, even as the implied Cole uses aspects of these encounters to hint at Julius’s ethical deficiency and to prepare his readers for the delayed disclosure.

In chapter twenty, Julius attends a party at Moji’s boyfriend’s apartment in May of 2007 and the morning after that party, Moji confronts him. The party goes late and the boyfriend

71 invites tired or intoxicated guests to sleep on one of his apartment’s many couches or beds. Julius goes to bed around two am and then awakes at six am. Finding no one else awake, Julius prepares to leave, slipping into the kitchen in hopes of drinking a cup of coffee before departing.

There he finds Moji and attempts to start a conversation. But Moji cuts straight to the chase: “in a low and even voice, emotional in its total lack of inflection…she said that, in late 1989, when she was fifteen and I [Julius] was a year younger, at a party her brother had hosted at their house in Ikoyi, I had forced myself on her. After, she said…, in the weeks that followed, in the months and years that followed, I had acted like I knew nothing about it, had even forgotten her, to the point of not recognizing her when we met again, and had never tried to acknowledge what I had done. This torturous deception had continued until the present. But it hadn’t been like that for her, she said, the luxury of denial had not been possible for her” (244). After Julius does not respond to these initial accusations, Moji proceeds to offer further substantiation for her claims:

“She told me who else had been at the party that night, and she described precise memory of what had happened: we had both been drinking beer, she was close to passing out, and I had taken her to another room and forced myself on her. For weeks afterward, she said, she wanted to die. I had refused to look at her, she said, and her brother Dayo knew that these things happened, not that they had discussed them…” (244-45). When Julius still does not respond, Moji becomes more insistent, targeting again Julius’s long silence and apparent ability to forget: “Moji’s voice, which had never increased in volume, had by now taken on a strained, shattered tone, as if she were getting hoarse. You’ll say nothing, she said. I know you’ll say nothing. I’m just another woman whose story of sexual abuse will not be believed. I know that. Look, bitterness has been eating at me all this time, because this was so long ago, and it’s my word against yours, and

72 you’ll say it was consensual, or that it never even happened…[But] I don’t think you’ve changed at all, Julius. Things don’t go away just because you choose to forget them. You forced yourself on me eighteen years ago because you could get away with it. But not in my heart, you didn’t. I have cursed you too many times to count. And maybe it is not something you would do today, but then again, I didn’t think it was something you would do back then either. It only needs to happen once. But will you say something now? Will you say something?” Tellingly, Julius leaves the apartment without speaking a word.

Credibility

How does Cole guide authorial readers to respond to this extraordinary revelation—and to Julius's apparent lack of response? First, he guides his audience to believe Moji not only by what she says in the scene but also by his planting clues about Julius's ethical deficiencies earlier in the novel. Hamish Daley conceptualizes these clues as textual or rhetorical features that

“complicate [Julius’s] imaginative self-positioning” (30). That being said, some clues or signals are more legible or impactful in their original placement than others. For example, while Dr.

Saito mentions in chapter one that he “adore[s] imaginary monsters,” but that he is “terrified by real ones” (11), few readers in that moment suspect the second half of this statement as an implicit reference to Julius. On the other hand, Cole from the very first chapter begins to complicate Julius’s self-presentation either through the content of his meditations and reflections or through his narrated actions. In this way, Cole plants the “seeds” of the novel’s delayed disclosure, but in order to maintain the initial rhetorical seduction he must be careful that they do not entirely topple Julius’s self-presentation and apparent ethics. But as complicating articulations and actions accumulate across the narrative progression, Cole takes his readers at

73 times nearly to the breaking point. This feature of the novel results in a spectrum of different responses in flesh-and-blood readers: some readers stay closely aligned with Julius despite the accumulation of complicating articulations and actions and thus are more genuinely surprised by the delayed disclosure, while other readers dis-align with Julius prior to the delayed disclosure with their suspicions and fears being confirmed by the delayed disclosure. Instead of providing a detailed analysis of the progression of these many clues or signals, I will focus instead on a particularly important and impactful series of such clues pertaining to Julius’s historic and contemporary relationships and valuations of women. As I just argued, these clues introduce significant complications and tensions into the novel’s rhetorical situation prior to the delayed disclosure without necessarily toppling Julius’s self-presentation and apparent ethics.

In chapter two, Julius describes his recent breakup with a long-term girlfriend Nadege. In his narration of their breakup conversation, Julius offers very little contextualizing information about their relationship or any explicit dialogue from the conversation itself. Instead, Julius’s narration follows his wandering thoughts during the conversation, which consider a political parade passing below his apartment window and recall a conversation earlier that day with a friend about American music and jazz. Then, near the end of the passage, Julius reports that during the conversation he could not remember what Nadege looked like: “I tried to imagine her in that crowd, but no image came to mind, nor could I picture her face as it would be if she’d been in the room with me” (24) While a plausible event—memory does in fact have significant limitations, Cole uses this event and the resulting narration to cast suspicions on Julius’s relationship to Nadege and his valuation of her as a person. When reading this passage, Cole’s

74 readers get the distinct feeling that the narrating Julius in fact values his passing thoughts more than his relationship with Nadege.

This second clue or signal in this series occurs in chapter three where Julius’s thoughts turn for the first time to his mother and maternal grandmother, “oma.” In this section, Julius provides an expansive and highly sympathetic evocation of his childhood relationship with his grandmother. As readers learn over the course of the first few chapters of the novel, Julius’s father was from Nigeria, and his mother was from Germany. Because his maternal grandmother continued to reside in Europe during Julius’s childhood, he only had a few occasions on which to visit with her. But in stark contrast to these fond memories are Julius’s reminiscences and comments about his mother. Early on in the chapter, Julius remarks in passing that: “My mother and I had become estranged from each other when I was seventeen, just before I left for

America” (34). Then when trying to explain their estrangement and long-time separation, Julius describes the reasons as “inchoate.” Notably, this passage sets up the expectation in authorial readers that this relationship will become a focal point of Julius’s narration and experience, and yet it does not. Julius only returns to their relationship on a few other occasions, and nowhere expands upon his initial explanation. Given Julius’s critical acumen and psychiatric training, his ellipsis is somewhat surprising and unsettling. Linking the first two incidents, authorial readers consider whether Julius’s deficits in his relationship with Nadege are somehow a continuation of this earlier familial trauma or breakdown.

Later in chapter ten, Cole adds another clue or signal to the emerging series, pushing the initial rhetorical alignment further towards a breaking point. There, Julius is in Brussels, meets a

Czech woman in a café, and shortly after sleeps with her. Julius describes this encounter as his

75 first affair since his break-up with Nadege. In Julius’s narration, he remembers this occasion fondly, dwelling on the woman’s older age and confidence. Julius’s account takes a more unsettling turn when he attempts late in the recollection to remember her name: “After, she told me her name—Marta? Esther? I forgot it immediately—explained, with some difficulty, that she handled the travel bookings for the Constitutional Court in Brno” (110). Despite the notable nature of the encounter—his first romantic liaison since Nadege, Julius does not hold onto her name as a significant piece of information. Here, Julius’s forgetting eerily echoes his earlier forgetting of Nadege’s face and more complexly his ellipsis about his estrangement with his mother. Together, these three incidents cast a significant shadow over Julius’s self-presentation and apparent ethics. While Julius appears to have ethically positive engagements with his friends, his academic mentor, and his patients, his relationships with women (and fellow immigrants) are much more problematic.

In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Cole makes the delayed disclosure in a way that leaves little room for doubt that Moji is telling the truth. Here, Julius’s narratorial functions and

Cole’s disclosure functions split off significantly. While Julius regards his account in this chapter as sufficient to exonerate himself to his narratee—in Julius’s argumentation, Moji becomes a crown example of his theories of the “opacity” of the human consciousness, Cole combines his earlier clues and signals with specific features of Julius’s narration and Moji’s testimony in this chapter to realign his readers with Moji against Julius. First, Julius, despite his argument, indicates that Moji showed no signs of lying or dissimulation during her accusations. Here, Julius relies on his experience as a psychiatrist: “And so, what does it mean when, in someone else’s version [of my life], I am villain? I am only too familiar with bad stories—because I hear them

76 frequently from patients. I know the tells of those who blame others, those who are unable to see that they themselves, and not the others, are the common thread in all their bad relationship.

There are characteristic tics that reveal the essential falsehood of such narratives” (244). Then regarding Moji’s testimony, Julius observes: “But what Moji has said to me that morning, before

I left John’s place, and gone up on the George Washington Bridge, and walked the few miles back home, had nothing in common with such stories. She had said it as if, with all of her being, she were certain of its accuracy.” Second, Moji’s testimony is compelling in its own right. In particular, Moji’s testimony is highly specific, isolating a particular time period (“late 1989”) and context (her brother Dayo’s party), referring to and describing other people at that party, and indicating the exact details of Julius’s violation and rape (Julius “had taken her to another room and forced [himself] on her”) (244). Moji goes so far as say that her brother Dayo knew of her violation and rape, but chose to do nothing about it, adding a further layer to her trauma: “[I]t was inconceivable that, in the shadows and absences of the night, he would not have known, and she hated him, she said, for having done nothing to protect her” (245). In addition, Cole uses the concluding questions to Moji’s testimony (“But will you say something now? Will you say something?”) to raise the stakes of his readers’ responses. In essence, Cole is asking his readers: who will we side with? Will we continue in our alignment with Julius? Or will we take the side of Moji? Third, Cole uses Julius’s concluding remarks about Moji’s confrontation to further reinforce her credibility and reliability. There, Julius recounts his wandering thoughts while listening to Moji make her accusations; instead of closely attending to her words and experiences, Julius retreats into one of his now characteristic historical and philosophical digressions. Understanding Moji’s narrative as a “double story,” Julius recalls to himself the

“double story concerning Nietzsche and Gaius Mucius Cordus Scaevola, a Roman hero from the sixth century B.C.E. Scaevola had been captured while trying to kill the Etruscan king Porsenna and, rather than give away his accomplices, he showed fearlessness by putting his right hand in a fire and letting it burn. From this act came his nickname, Scaevola, the left-handed. Nietzsche, according to Camus, became angry when his schoolmates would not believe the Scaevola story.

And so, the fifteen-year-old Nietzsche plucked a hot coal from the grate, and held it. Of course, it burned him. He carried the resulting scar with him for the rest of his life” (246). While the implications of this digression are somewhat ambiguous (Is Julius like Scaevola? Is Moji like

Nietzsche?), Julius’s digressions suggest a more pathological need to dissociate himself from emotionally-charged situations, even as Cole uses them to move forward with his multilayered ethical critique of Julius’s theoretical positions and more implicitly his methods of narration.

Consequences of Delayed Disclosure on Julius’s Ethical Status as Both Character and Narrator

As previously suggested, Cole skillfully uses the novel’s delayed disclosure in its penultimate chapter to reconfigure existing rhetorical alignments. In the chapters leading up to the delayed disclosure, the implied Cole, the narrator Julius, and the authorial audience remain closely aligned despite the presence and accumulation of indications of Julius’s ethical deficiencies. But after the delayed disclosure, these rhetorical alignments shift as authorial readers dis-align with Julius and remain aligned with the implied Cole in anticipation of sufficient interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic payoffs in the final chapters. In light of Moji’s accusations and Cole’s framing of them as credible and reliable, authorial readers at this point in the narrative progression engage in an extensive process of reexamination, reevaluation, and reconfiguration of Julius’s character, his act of narration, his theoretical positions, and the

78 implied Cole’s narrative and rhetorical projects. Julius’s character is now seen as profoundly ethically deficient. In the novel’s ethical economy, Julius’s violation and rape of Moji is an unequivocal evil, and Cole positions this judgment as the logical point of departure for his multilayered critique of Julius’s narration and his theoretical positions.

The delayed disclosure also asks Cole’s readers to reevaluate, reexamine, and reconfigure

Julius’s activity as narrator and his act of narration. Here, Cole uses paradoxical paralipsis and its conclusion in the middle of chapter twenty to usher in a two-phased critique of Julius’s narration and his theoretical positions. In the first phase, the delayed disclosure involves the reexamination and reevaluation of Julius’s narration and theoretical positions in the first twenty chapters. That being said, the novel’s reconfiguration more closely aligns Julius’s narratorial activities to his crimes and ethical deficiencies. In this first phase of Cole’s multilayered critique, Julius’s narrations are revealed as a primary vehicle through which he maintains his ethical appearances while his historical, theoretical, and aesthetic interests are now reconfigured as his way of carrying on with “life-as-usual” albeit at an extremely high ethical cost. In the second phase,

Cole brings the paradoxical paralipsis to a conclusion through the delayed disclosure. In other words, the narrating Julius proceeds in the final chapter with knowledge of Moji’s accusations and his own ethical deficiencies. Here, Cole lifts the limits on his readers’ critique and accordingly his theoretical positions and methods of narrations are even more closely aligned with his crimes and ethical deficiencies. There, Julius more brazenly deploys his historical, theoretical, and aesthetic interests to reinforce an apparent ethics now rendered bankrupt through the novel’s powerful reversals.

Consequences of Delayed Disclosure for Julius’s Theoretical Positions

Throughout the novel, Julius’s aesthetic interests and sensibilities gravitate toward

European novelists, philosophers, composers, photographers, and painters. His meditations demonstrate wide-ranging historical knowledge about particular artists and works of art as well as ample sensitivity to the complex affordances of different art forms. In these meditations,

Julius appreciates the world-building nature of “great” works of art. Given the right conditions,

Julius can become deeply immersed in particular works of art and the worlds they evoke. For

Julius, these aesthetic transports are highly desirable and can lead to spiritual insights and ethical transformations. But Cole uses some of the immediate consequences of his aesthetic experiences early on and then the delayed disclosure to suggest the limited transferability of ethical insights gained in the context of aesthetic experiences to other areas of a person’s life and conduct. In chapter three, for instance, Cole depicts Julius deeply engaged with the portraits of John

Brewster at the American Folk Art Museum. In his meditations on these works, he arrives at significant spiritual insights and ethical convictions, but is unable to carry them over into his everyday life when dealing with a cabdriver outside the museum. In a later scene set during

Julius’s visit to Brussels, Cole seemingly problematizes Julius’s aestheticism from the other direction. Walking into a church while waiting to meet an acquaintance for lunch, Julius is pleasantly surprised to hear “the organ being played softly” (138). Trying to identify the piece,

Julius remarks “I noticed, just then, a dissonance in the sound of the organ music. There were distinct fugitive notes that shot through the musical texture, like shafts of light refracted through stained class. I was sure it was a Baroque piece, not one I had heard before, but with all the ornamentation typical of the period, yet it had taken on the spirit of something else—what came to mind was Peter Maxell Davies’s “O God Abufe”—a fractured, scattered feeling.” But after

80 walking closer to the organ, Julius realizes “there was no organist playing at all” but a cassette player with “the source of the fracture in the sound: a small yellow vacuum cleaner” (138). In this scene, Julius’s inclination toward aesthetic experiences leads him to misinterpret and misevaluate his present situation. While such a moment is consistent with Julius’s abiding interests in epistemological confusion and breakdown, Cole at the same time uses it and other scenes like it found in the chapters leading up to the delayed disclosure to suggest a more incipient form of violence at work in Julius’s aestheticism. Generally, Cole focuses his critique on Julius’s need to divide the world cleanly into aesthetic vs. ordinary experiences. While this move allows Julius to make significant insights with the potentiality for ethical transformation, it also appears to limit or contain those insights to an artificial aesthetic sphere or world of reference. Then, through delayed disclosure Cole situates Julius’s violation and rape of Moji as a primary motivator behind his need for division between spheres and the corresponding blockage between ethical insights in the aesthetic sphere to the sphere of more ordinary experience. Here,

Cole is not completely repudiating the distinction between ordinary and aesthetic experiences, but rather he is using his novel’s distinctive rhetorical operations and its refracted realism more generally to contextualize this Romantic and modernist concept/practice along a spectrum of ethical possibilities and valuations depending upon particular conditions, purposes, implementations, and consequences.

Julius’s theorization of traumatic experience proceeds very closely in relation to his notion of New York City as a “palimpsest.” Early on in his narrative, Julius intimates that the layers of this “palimpsest” primarily consist of historic instances of violence, murder, genocide, rape, oppression, financial inequity, and trauma. In this context, Julius frames his walks through

New York as an attempt on his part to explore these traumatic networks below the surface of received and normative histories of the city as “global center” of power and culture. In Julius’s analysis, traumatic experiences range from the personal and individual to the collective and intergenerational, and as such are by no means monolithic but range in expression and consequence depending upon their circumstances. In his professional interactions with his patients, he highlights the intractability of traumatic experience in light of its repetitive or iterative processes or cycles. In the first few chapters, Julius effectively uses the list or catalogue to bring these traumatic experiences to light. When walking through an open-air market in

Harlem, Julius produces this list: “There were self-published books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa. One table displayed enlarged photographs of early-twentieth century lynchings of African-Americans” (18). In the novel’s later chapters, Julius’s commentary grows more pointed as he attempts to make specific links between the city’s geographical, historical, and traumatic layers. When looking out at Ellis Island, Julius remarks: “Out, ahead of me, in the

Hudson, there was just the faintest echo of old whaling ships, the whales, and the generations of

New Yorkers who had come here to the promenade to watch wealth and sorrow flow into the city or simply to see the light play on the water. Each one of those past moments was present now as a trace. From where I stood, the Statue of Liberty was a fluorescent green fleck against the sky, and beyond her sat Ellis Island, the focus of so many myths; but it had been built too late for those early Africans—who weren’t immigrants in any case—and it had closed too soon to mean anything to the later Africans like…me” (54-55). Here, Julius’s meditations on trauma turn from “old whaling ships” to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and his own experience of immigration

82 in the late 1980s in an attempt to approximate his own place in the unfolding history of New

York City. A few pages later, Julius returns to earlier thoughts about the World Trade Center and

9/11: “But atrocity is nothing new, not to humans, not to animals. The difference is that in our time it is uniquely well organized….This was not the first erasure on the site. Before the towers had gone up, there had been a bustling network of little streets traversing this part of town….And, before that?...The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten…Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories”

(59). In this way, Cole initially situates Julius as empathetically working out his own place, perhaps even his own complicity, in these histories of violence, war, and trauma. But the novel’s delayed disclosure reveals much more definitively Julius’s “part in these stories.” When 14, he rapes Moji, and a few years later, he leaves for America in an effort push his ethical deficiencies further out of his consciousness. Additionally, Cole uses Julius’s case to raise questions about the possibility of perpetrator trauma. In other words, is it possible for a perpetrator to be traumatized by his or her own acts of traumatization? To this question, Cole appears to respond, “yes,” but he uses the novel’s final chapters to foreground the differences between Moji’s and Julius’s experiences of trauma. While Moji experiences trauma as a never-ending comingling of the traumatic past and present—“the luxury of denial had not been possible for her” (244), Julius’s traumatization factors into his suppression of his ethical deficiencies from his consciousness and thus to a certain extent allows him to believe in his self-presentation and his apparent ethics, even after Moji makes her dramatic appeal to Julius in the penultimate chapter.

The Final Chapter

In the final chapter, Cole’s critique of Julius’s character, his act of narration, and his theoretical positions enters its second and more acute phase. In this chapter, the narrating Julius now proceeds with full knowledge of Moji’s accusations and his ethical deficiencies. While

Julius ostensibly believes in this chapter that he did not rape Moji, Cole’s readers now regard

Moji’s testimony as credible and reliable and thus regard his choices as narrator and his ongoing theoretical interests and engagements in the final chapter as more conscious efforts to deny

Moji’s claims and experiences. The narration in the final chapter continues several months after

Moji’s confrontation with Julius in May 2007. Julius has completed his residency and has accepted a position in private practice. The narrated action focuses on Julius’s attendance of a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall in September of 2007. The chapter’s aesthetic analysis is sumptuous and highlights Julius’s many areas of expertise and his gifts of expression. From his perspective, the evocation of Mahler’s work serves as fitting culmination for his narrative. According to this logic, the first chapter features an unsuccessful attempt to immerse himself in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde—another highly acclaimed late orchestral work—in a crowded record store, but the final chapter includes a more successful immersion under the brilliant direction of Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in one of the city’s most beloved music halls. But the delayed disclosure ensures that Cole’s readers can no longer join in on Julius’s confident self-presentation and self-appraisal. While many aspects of

Julius’s final narration stand out as part of Cole’s more acute critique, I will focus on a series of elements that Cole uses to bring Moji’s claims and experiences back to the foreground of the narrative.

Cole relies heavily on the split between narratorial and disclosure functions, using

Julius’s observations to say more than he intends. Through this series of scenes and passages, I argue, Cole brings his multilayered ethical critique of Julius and his theoretical positions to a conclusion. According to its multileveled design, Cole’s critique grows increasingly acute in relation to Julius’s attempts to more consciously manipulate his narratee. In this way, Cole subtly shifts attention away from Julius’s theoretical positions per se to his ethically deficient use and redeployment of them, and in the very same process opens up the possibility for a different, more ethically engaged deployment of these positions at the level of his novel’s rhetorical design and refracted realism. Additionally, the final chapter gives Cole’s readers an opportunity to reflect on their own attractions to and investments in Julius’s character, his act of narration, and his theoretical interests in the first twenty chapters of the novel. In essence, the final chapter offers readers a narration and some theoretical analysis that is virtually identical—on the surface—to other narrations and analyses found throughout the novel, but the terrain here has shifted violently. No longer are Julius’s interests, methods of narration, erudition, and aestheticism a marker or indicator of his ethical sensitivity and responsibility, but in fact now denote the very opposite: a willful attempt to erase Moji’s traumatic experiences.

The first passage in this concluding series occurs relatively late in the middle of chapter twenty one. In his narration, Julius provides an extended history of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

In it, he highlights the anti-Semitism that drove Mahler from his directorship at the Vienna

Opera, and the shocking death of his daughter Maria Anna in the year preceding the composition of the Ninth. Cole here shows Julius exuding his now familiar sensitivity and tact when exploring the lives and traumatic experiences of historical figures, particularly artists he loves

85 and admires, but this capacity of feeling and empathy is here sharply contrasted with his very recent denial of and flight from Moji. As a result, authorial readers understand that the divide between Julius’s aesthetic experiences and other kinds of experience continues to stand fast. But in the absence of paradoxical paralipsis, Julius himself is figured as the more instrumental agent behind this separation, with the tragic result that Mahler’s personal history—one filled with profound loss and needless struggle—gets redeployed here in an effort to hide wrongdoing and to excise or suppress Moji’s experiences from Julius’s personal narrative.

The second element in this concluding series appears once the performance of the Ninth is underway. After lush and detailed descriptions of the first three movements, Julius turns his attention to an incident that occurs in Carnegie Hall in the pause between the third and final movements. Down on the floor in the front row, an elderly woman suddenly gets up from her seat, and appears disoriented, suggesting possible physical or mental distress: “The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music. One of her arms was slightly raised, as though she were being led forward by a helper—as though I was down there with my oma and the sweep of the music was pushing us gently forward as I escorted her out into the darkness. As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which, to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog”

(253-54). Here, ironies abound as Julius translates this woman’s experience and possible distress into an imaginative trope and a flight of fancy. Under the sway of one of his favorite pieces of music, Julius latches onto the event and uses it in his narration to complete his narrative

86 incursions about his family of origin. Notably, in his imaginings, Julius becomes the helper who assists this elderly woman—figured as his “oma”—in exiting the hall, but in reality, Julius, like the crowd that surrounds him, stands still and simply observes the event, secretly longing for its conclusion, in order to resume aesthetic transport through the music being performed.

Additionally, this scene reminds authorial readers of Julius’s failed attempt to find his “oma” while in Brussels. But for Julius, an imagined reunion complexly linked to an imagined ethical act suffices as a proper conclusion for his family history.

More implicitly, Cole uses this scene to ask his readers to think more deeply about their own engagements with his work of fiction. Are we seeking an escape from reality through the act of reading, or can engagement with a novel constitute an ethical act in its own right? In Open

City, Cole suggests that reading fiction is ethically ambidextrous, depending on who readers are and where their investments lie. In some cases, reading fiction can be a vital ethical activity. In

Open City, Cole strives towards this possibility when using his novel’s delayed disclosure and its refracted realism more generally to snap readers out of their initial conception of the work in progress and to activate its complex and multilayered ethical critique. While in other cases—like

Julius’s engagements with literature and Mahler in the final chapter—reading fiction can also be an escape, a prompt for greater self-deception, or an instrument for suppressing and even erasing the traumatic experience of others.

Conclusion

In Open City, Cole positions recent trends in immigration, the spread of global capitalism, and the rise of digital culture described in the novel as an opportunity to revisit and reevaluate his modernist and postmodernist literary and cultural inheritances. In this context,

Cole uses the ethical preoccupations and inquiries of his refracted realism to reexamine the rise and lasting impact of modernist and postmodernist epistemologies and psychologies, modes of aesthetic appreciation and analysis, theorizations of war, violence, and trauma, recent reengagements with cosmopolitanism, and historiographies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, Cole’s project dwells on recent and contemporary theorizations of traumatic experiences as a central thematic and ethical problematic. In the novel, Julius displays a depth of knowledge about historical and more recent wars, violence, genocide, rape, and trauma and uses his walks through New York City as an attempt to trace the ongoing impact of those experiences and processes to the present day. In this mode, Julius also demonstrates a keen awareness of recent developments in trauma theory via critics like Shoshanna Felman, Judith

Herman, Cathy Caruth, Daniel Schechter, and Basel Van der Kolk. These scholars influence his worldview and his methods of therapeutic intervention with his patients, many of whom evidence signs of PTSD and ongoing traumatization. But in Julius’s peculiar case, this awareness and knowledge complexly serves as a screen for his own implication in ongoing processes of violence, traumatization, cover-up, and ethical posturing. Here, Cole redeploys Julius’s concept of “a blind spot” to suggest that war, violence, trauma, and rape are so pervasive in contemporary cultures, societies, and histories that they have partially eroded our ability— collectively and individually—to fully conceptualize, acknowledge, and understand these processes and experiences and thus have significantly impacted our ability to ethically engage with these problematics and more importantly with the persons who have most forcefully been impacted by them. At this level, Cole juxtaposes complexly the interest and willingness of many contemporary critics, politicians, historians, philosophers, artists, and cultural theorists to engage

88 with and deploy broadly a variety of different conceptions of traumatic experience with the inescapable fact that war, violence, trauma, and rape remain a daily reality or insistent presence for a majority of persons, populations, cultures, societies, and nations around the world. But

Cole’s critique does not focus solely on Julius as character and narrator and his theoretical positions but also is extended implicitly to his authorial readers. Cole uses the novel’s paradoxical paralipsis and rhetorical seduction to make evident to his readers see just how easy it is to miss, downplay, or bracket signs and symptoms of trauma and ethical deficiency in the face of other overriding cultural, political, educational, and economic markers which in the case of

Julius include his modernist and postmodernist sensibilities, his hesitant cosmopolitanism, his

Ivy League education, and his affluence and professional class. Stated more strongly, this critique implies that Cole’s readers are themselves implicated or imbricated within the systems of power and knowledge that have historically, politically, and philosophically downplayed, diminished traumatic events and experiences. But before we understand Cole as engaged entirely in an explosive act of repudiation of his literary and cultural inheritances and recent and contemporary theorizations of trauma, it is important to remember the care with which Cole cultivates the novel’s rhetorical seduction and its unusually extended nature, commencing in chapter one and concluding in the middle of chapter twenty. In this way, Cole can be seen as holding onto and in a sense cherishing his modernist and postmodernist inheritances, using them as an integral part of his own estrangement and refinement of his novel’s realist components.

As previously noted, Cole takes a great risk in involving his readers in the critique. As

Rebecca Clark as rightly observed, the novel’s powerful reversals inspire a feeling of “disgust” in many readers, which is not solely focused on Julius’s ethical deficiencies. But the enrichment

89 of the novel’s thematic and ethical preoccupations that stems from the reversals assure that most readers do not judge Cole too harshly for the rhetorical seduction. At the level of literary history, the novel’s reversal or delayed disclosure allows Cole to cultivate different conceptions of its aesthetic dominant over the course of its narrative progression. Under the influence of the rhetorical seduction, many readers regard Cole’s novel as a neo-modernist epistemological experiment involving a more detached and Sebaldian examination of trauma, aesthetics, history, and culture. But when Moji accuses Julius of raping her, Cole reveals a different kind of narrative design, rhetorical construction, and aesthetic dominant. Thus activating and intensifying the novel’s many ethical moments, conversations, and inquiries, Cole injects a dynamism into the novel’s existing epistemological elements, drawing his readers more deeply and problematically its ethical critique and reevaluation of literary and cultural modernism and postmodernism, while offering up a fresh and provocative reexamination of traumatic experience and its various redeployments in contemporary culture and society.

Chapter 4: Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad:

Disjunctive Storytelling, Ethical Complexity, and Refracted Realism

Introduction

In Goon Squad’s innovative narrative and rhetorical design, Egan tells thirteen loosely- connected stories, each from a different temporal and narratorial perspective, using a range of styles and formats including two intradiegetic objects: Jules Jones’s unpublished magazine article in chapter nine and Alison Blake’s PowerPoint presentation in chapter twelve. While many critics and reviewers have noted the text’s resemblance to a “short-story collection” or

“cycle,” Egan has carefully “braided” her individual chapters into a complex whole best conceptualized as a novel and as a work of refracted realism. In balancing out her novel’s

“centripetal” and “centrifugal” tendencies, Egan takes as her primary focus the question of time and how time tests and forges lives and values. Throughout the novel, Egan foregrounds her realist interests in the mimetic and thematic components, representing her characters as “possible people” and her narrative world as one “like our own” and the “ideological function of the narrative” (Phelan), but she “refracts” these interests through disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, future-oriented representation, and chapter-long redeployments of various modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices as an integral part of her ethical project. As such, Egan’s novel involves a process of refraction that is at once more complicated and more nuanced than my other examples of refracted realism in this dissertation.

First, Egan uses disjunctive temporality and multiple narration throughout her entire project to explore characters’ lives from multiple perspectives and to introduce significant temporal and narrative gaps between these engagements which complicate readers’ effort to make definitive interpretive and evaluative judgments about their lives and experiences. Second,

Egan uses the novel’s far-reaching prolepses—particularly in chapters four and eleven—and future-oriented representation in its concluding chapters, set in the not-too-distant future, to explore the long-term consequences of early incidents, experiences, and actions and in doing so to further characterize the personal and ethical development of particular characters. Third, Egan uses other modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices like multi-modal textuality, second-person narration, metafiction, or metalepsis usually for the length of a single chapter to generate and complicate her realist portraits of individual characters, to continue her engagement with ethical questions and concerns, and more implicitly to showcase the ethical potentiality of these devices and strategies when redeployed in the context of a literary aesthetic like refracted realism

In Goon Squad, Egan combines these means or methods of refraction to push back on realist traditions and conventions that privilege particular voices and perspectives. In contrast to many realist projects that rely on either a controlling heterodiegetic narrator or a continuous first- person homodiegetic narrator, Egan complexly divides up her literary field using what initially appears to be a “ragtag” assortment of characters, styles, and viewpoints. While six of the novel’s chapters use a form of heterodiegetic narration, Egan relies on wide-ranging and diverse focalizations to frame them as distinctive and individual narrative engagements. In the novel’s other chapters, Egan enlists the services of various characters—some minor and others major—

92 to offer a first-person perspective—and in one case a second-person perspective—on a particular events or actions. Individually, Egan’s chapters tend to focus on ethical crises or controversies in the lives of individual characters. Some chapters show characters in a moment of significant decline and/or ethical compromise. Other chapters capture characters in their youth or in a period leading up to a noteworthy or transformative event. In between individual chapters, Egan opens up a lot of narrative and temporal space for readers to consider how these different engagements connect up into a larger whole. Some characters, like Sasha and Bennie, are giving several engagements over the course of the novel’s narrative progression, making the process of reconstruction and reevaluation in their cases somewhat easier, but other characters only appear once or twice in the narrative, offering the reader a more limited or punctuated view.

Temporally, Egan’s novel focuses on narrative action ranging from the early 1970s to the not- too-distant future in the 2020s. Egan’s temporal movement between chapters initially appears quite arbitrary. The novel’s first chapters are set in the early 2000s; then time shifts abruptly back to the 1970s, before returning to 2000s by chapter five, etc. But eventually, readers realize that Egan is using these temporal movements to incrementally push deeper into the past of her two protagonists or primary characters—Sasha and Bennie—before exploring their not-too- distant futures in the final two chapters.

Thematically, the novel also offers a wide array of interests and concerns, which Egan skillfully integrates into the novel’s larger ethical project. As many reviewers have noted, Egan has a sustained thematic interest in the recording industry and rock and roll history, following several of her characters’ careers in the music business, but individual chapters also explore thematics as diverse as parenting, betrayal, addiction, suicide, academia, media culture, and the

93 digital revolution, allowing Egan to offer in Goon Squad a broader realist study of recent and contemporary US life and society. As an integral part of Egan’s ethical project, she uses contrasts between individual characters’ stories and experiences to highlight the ongoing patriarchy and misogyny at work in the music industry and related technological and media fields, and her broader critique highlights how both cultural forces and personal choices contribute to these trends.

From this complex constellation of rhetorical engagements, narratorial perspectives, temporal positions, and thematic interests, Egan offers her answer to the novel’s central question:

Why do some characters fare better than others when dealing with time’s “goon squad”? On the one hand, Egan’s answer points to particular social, political, economic, and technological forces and processes. Whereas Bennie can draw on all the affordances of his masculinity and a position of power and influence when working through a middle-life crisis, Sasha’s kleptomania leads to the loss of her job as Bennie’s assistant, limiting her options in moving forward. On the other hand, Egan’s answer lies—in tandem with her abiding interest in casting her characters as

“survivors” rather than “victims” of time’s goon squad—in personal capacities and choices, which are frequently forged in the crucible of personal and ethical crises. In particular, Egan is interested in her characters’ ability to reinvent themselves through dynamic and diverse methods of storytelling. While Egan’s novel indicates that storytelling is “ethically ambidextrous”— meaning that stories can have a wide range of different ethical purposes and consequences— many of her characters find disjunctive modes of storytelling such as Lincoln’s musical pauses,

Sasha’s “found object” collages, and Alison’s PowerPoint presentation in chapter twelve as particularly responsive to their own personal “peaks” and “valleys” as well as the narrative

94 worlds they inhabit. Then at the authorial level, Egan offers her own highly disjunctive mode of storytelling wherein she braids together literary realism’s long-standing interests in the mimetic and thematic components with modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies like disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, multi-modal textuality, second-person narration, and metafiction in order to offer a compelling study of the ethical complexity and ambiguity of contemporary US life and society.

A Short History of Disjunctive Temporality and Multiple Narration

In the history of the novel, the narrative and rhetorical resources of disjunctive temporality and multiple narration have played a significant role throughout much of its development. Alternations and disjunctions between different temporal situations and different narratorial sources have proven to be valuable resources that novelists can use to create multiple perspectives on a given narrative action or world, thus realizing to some extent the novel form’s dialectical or dialogical potential. That being said, modernist and postmodernist novelists have more heavily relied on and more extensively experimented with these resources compared with novelists of earlier periods, and in so doing have expanded the concept of the novel during their respective periods to now include highly fragmentary or episodic works, short story cycles, and multimodal and multimedia texts. Modernist and postmodernist novelists have used disjunctive temporality and multiple narration to explore the characteristic concerns of their respective aesthetic dominants. Adopting Brian McHale’s approach which I consider in my introduction, I would argue that modernist novelists such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia

Woolf have generally experimented with these resources in order to grapple with epistemological concerns and questions. For modernist writers, the alternation and disjunction between temporal

95 situations and narratorial sources can be used quite effectively to obscure or complicate the nature of a particular narrative action and the narrative world more generally. For instance, late modernist novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon pushed these techniques to their rhetorical and logical limits in order to render that nature either inaccessible to or unknowable by their readers. Postmodernist novelists continue to work in this vein but characteristically redeploy disjunctive temporality and narration in order to explore ontological concerns and questions. In the postmodernist works of Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Lyn

Hejinian, alternations and disjunctions in time and narration are used to multiply narrative worlds and to interrogate and problematize the boundaries between textual and extratextual worlds.

More pointedly, Egan’s work emerges from a century-long practice or tradition of redeploying the short story cycle towards novelistic ends and purposes. James Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood

Anderson’s Wineburg, Ohio, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses establish the method initially, generally in pursuit of modernism’ epistemological questions and concerns, while postmodernist writers like Angela Carter, Grace Paley, Robert Coover, and Ron

Sukenick cultivate a particularly heightened form of disjunction and multiplicity, representing a broader aesthetic shift toward ontological questions and concerns.

In the years since the rise of postmodernism, novelists have continued to rely on disjunctive temporality and narration, and many do continue to use these resources to foreground and explore epistemological and/or ontological concerns and questions. But in the late 1990s and the 2000s, novelists such as Barbara Kingsolver, Philip Roth, and Colum McCann begin to redeploy these resources to explore and sometimes foreground ethical concerns and questions. In

The Poisonwood Bible (1998), The Human Stain (2000), and Let the Great World Spin (2009),

96 narration is typically distributed between a small number of narratorial sources that alternate in some fashion in order to present multiple perspectives on a particular ethical or political situation. Sometimes, temporal shifting can be quite dramatic, particularly in the beginning and ending sections of these works, but in their middle sections, narrative temporality more regularly unfolds in a progressive or chronological fashion. Recently, Corinne Bancroft has described such novels as “braided narratives,” referring to their multiple narratorial sources and the complex arrangement of individual narrations towards the exploration of particular ethical concerns and questions. While I believe Egan’s novel is a good example of a braided narrative, I would also insist that the number of its narratorial perspectives and its highly disjunctive shifts in narrative temporality renders it an exemplum in extremis. In Goon Squad, Egan uses her thirteen narratorial sources and thirteen different temporal positions placed in a predominantly non- chronological order to place significant pressure on the possibility of braiding without entirely giving up on that possibility. For Egan, first acknowledging and then abiding with the difficulty and complexity of her narrative’s braiding is a crucial part of her ethical project.

Egan’s General Ethical Interests and Concerns

As mentioned above, Egan foregrounds ethical questions and concerns throughout the novel’s narrative progression but uses her methods of refraction to modulate her ethical values and commitments in relation to changing time frames, narrative situations, narratorial sources, thematic preoccupations, and character-character interactions. In Goon Squad, Egan’s general ethical interests and concerns are quite expansive, but tend to focus on: (1) the influence of affective processes on ethical values and decision-making, (2) the pervasiveness of traumatic experience, (3) the complex interplay between social forces and personal choices, (4) the

97 temporal nature of ethical values and commitments, (5) the relative inaccessibility of other minds, and (6) the patriarchy and misogyny that still dominates much of contemporary American life and society. Here, I will briefly characterize the first five general interests and concerns, and will consider the sixth one at greater length when analyzing Sasha’s and Bennie’s narrative braids.

First, all of Egan’s chapters recognize the profound impact of affective processes upon ethical beliefs, choices, and judgments. Egan’s narrations usually penetrate deep into the consciousness of a focal character and/or narrator, and from that vantage point reveal the complex affective layers or experiences that factor into and influence particular ethical processes and engagements. By no means a straightforward or linear process, affective and ethical engagements interpenetrate each other’s purposes, functions, and consequences, while not entirely collapsing one into the other. Second, as a part of Egan’s interest in affect, she recognizes the pervasive nature of traumatic experiences in contemporary American life and society. In Goon Squad, traumatic experiences take many forms and have as their source not just individual actions but collective processes like the patriarchal construction of many aspects of contemporary life and society. While traumatic experiences abound throughout Egan’s narrative, she at the same time is hesitant to conceptualize contemporary life and society as a more generalized trauma or a meta-traumatic experience, as her various character sequences or progressions intimate the individual’s and the group’s ability or capacity to survive traumatic experiences and transform them into opportunities for further growth and even positive ethical transformation.

Third, like many realist novels, Goon Squad recognizes the complex imbrication among social, political, environmental, economic, and cultural forces on the one hand and individual’s and group’s choices and ethical engagements on the other hand. As a novel interested in several periods of American and global history, Goon Squad tracks different manifestations or expressions of these forces as they inform, complicate, and in a certain sense “determine” individual and collective choices. But critically, Egan’s model of force or determination includes the possibility of individual choice and collective agency and thus in this hybrid context where force and choice overlap and cohabit, Egan seeks to hold individuals and groups responsible for their choices and the short-term and long-term consequences of those choices. In her novel’s ethical project, some of her characters like Sasha and Jocelyn grow more adept at parsing out these distinctions in their own lives and in the context of their own ethical engagements, while others like Bennie and Bosco grow more rigid or inflexible, conceptualizing choice as force or force as choice in an effort to obscure their own narratorial unreliability and ethical deficiency.

Fourth, Egan’s general ethical interests and concerns include the temporal nature of ethical values and commitments and the ethical purposes, choices, and actions that accompany them. In Goon Squad, Egan explores “the ethics of time” in terms of both the objective and subjective genitive. For Egan, time is an ethical factor or force in its own right. Time, personified as a “goon,” batters and abuses the novel’s cast of characters, but seemingly not as part of some preordained plan but randomly, unconditionally, and largely without respite. Viewed in this light, her characters’ opposition to time’s stealth and guile becomes a possible source and inspiration for mutual recognition of their own vulnerability and finiteness, but in the highly individualistic and capitalistic settings of the novel’s storyworld these recognitions turn out to be few and far

99 between, usually occurring in small groups during a moment of crisis or trauma, but then dispersing when the crisis has passed. In addition, human existence in Goon Squad unfolds in time and through temporal processes. Accordingly, all ethical values, commitments, choices, and actions—to some extent—have a temporal aspect or context, meaning in Egan’s novel, that all values and choices bear the imprint of the times, forces, and motivations of their origins and subsequent histories. But Egan’s disjunctive historical approach also recognizes how the passage of time affects our interpretations and evaluations of past beliefs, commitments, and choices. In the novel, this process unfolds simultaneously and complexly at the level of the narrated and the narrating. For instance, Sasha eventually comes to regard her kleptomania described at length in chapter one as ethically deficient, seeking to transform this impulse or propensity in a later chapter into an artistic endeavor and method; just as Egan’s readers come over time to factor in

Sasha’s early experiences of abandonment and her sexual exploitation as a late teen into their ethical estimation of her theft described in the novel’s first chapter.

Fifth, Egan’s ethical interests and concerns include the recognition of the relative inaccessibility of other minds as a kind of ethical principle. Given that human beings can only know so much about the world and those who populate it, Egan’s narrative advises—through its individual chapters and its disjunctive temporality and multiple narration more generally—that we temper and contextualize our interpretive and evaluative conclusions accordingly. At this level, she contemplates a responsible use of language and technology that acknowledges and respects the ontological and epistemological separateness of other persons while at the same time not foreclosing entirely on the possibility of making meaningful or substantive contact or communication.

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The Novel’s Disjunctive Temporality and Multiple Narration

Egan uses the resource of disjunctive temporality to focus on a different historical time frame for narrated action in all of the novel’s thirteen chapters—six in part one and seven in part two. In the first part of the novel, Egan relies heavily on references to popular songs, musical trends, and technological developments to date the time of action, while in the second part of the novel, Egan increasingly relies on readers’ expanding knowledge of the particular histories of individual characters and cross-references to those histories to date narrated action. In first part of the novel, time of narrated action begins in 2007/8 in chapter one and then shifts to the mid-

2000s (chapter two), 1979/80 (chapter three), the early 1970s (chapter four), the mid-2000s

(chapter five), and the mid-1990s (chapter six). In the second part of the novel, time of narrated action shifts to the early 2000s in chapter seven, eight, and nine, and then to the early 1990s

(chapter ten), the late 1980s (chapter eleven), and the 2020s in chapters twelve and thirteen.

Here, I rely on the work of several scholars when assigning these dates—Alicia Rouverol in particular—but I have intentionally kept my dates less exact and more suggestive than these other efforts to indicate that Egan’s narrative project hinges less on working out the exact temporal sequencing between these chapters and more on assigning each chapter to a distinctive historical periods (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2020s). In the long run, it matters little whether the narrated action of chapter two precedes or immediately follows from the narrated action of chapter five, but it is significant in the novel’s global schema that Bennie’s middle-life crisis coincides with Lou’s death of disease and remorse in the early 2000s.

While temporal shifts or movements between individual chapters initially appear quite arbitrary, a governing logic emerges over the course of the progression. In the novel’s first part,

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Egan generally focuses on her major characters later in the lives, usually in the midst of a crisis.

The first chapter examines Sasha in her mid-thirties wherein she struggles with kleptomania and a relative lack of direction in both career and love life. Similarly, chapter two focuses on Bennie in his mid-forties, recently divorced from Stephanie and struggling with “shame memories” and sexual impotency. At the same time, Egan uses the temporal shifts between the first few chapters to incrementally move backwards in historical time, simultaneously initiating a gradual shift in interest away from middles and to beginnings or origins. As part of this process, Egan shifts to

Bennie’s earlier life after chapter two, before turning to Sasha’s past and future in a series of climactic chapters near the end of the second part. In this way, Egan uses the overall layout of her narrative—its two part or “sided” structure—to emphasize and interrogate differences between her two primary characters as they grapple with many similar life problems but from different sides of the gender divide.

Multiple narration in the novel primarily unfolds in terms of its chapters’ thirteen distinctive narratorial sources. Therein, Egan features heterodiegetic or homodiegetic sources, using the first, second, or third person, in a variety of styles and dictions, and exploring a wide range of thematic interests, with two chapters formulated as intratextual objects. Egan uses heterodiegetic narratorial sources in seven of the novel’s chapters, and uses homodiegetic narratorial sources in six of its chapters. In the novel’s narrative progression, Egan begins with heterodiegetic narratorial sources in chapters one and two, both narrated in the third person, and ends the novel in the final chapter with a similar narratorial situation. Despite some consistency in tone, style, diction, and thematic interests across the novel’s heterodiegetic chapters, Egan uses disjunctive temporality and the very different focalizations within each chapter to

102 discourage her readers from regarding these chapters as a continuous block of text or as having a meta-heterodiegetic narratorial organizer other than Egan herself. Egan’s homodiegetic chapters feature Rhea, Jocelyn, Scotty, Jules, Rob, Uncle Teddy, and Alison as narrators and/or creators of intratextual objects. All these chapters are narrated in the first person with the exception of

Rob’s chapter, which is narrated in the second person. In addition, Egan relies on the present tense in the majority of her homodiegetic narrations. While the heterodiegetic chapters offer readers access to focalized characters’ subjective experiences with time, Egan combines first- person and present-tense narration in the homodiegetic chapters to offer more sustained and immersive engagements with particular character’s perceptions and ethical judgments.

Refraction through Disjunctive Temporality and Multiple Narration: Ethical Consequences

Egan refracts her realist interests through disjunctive temporality and multiple narration in order to accomplish what Bancroft has recently described as “narrative braiding.” According to Bancroft, “braided narratives…plait together narrative threads, distinct in terms of both narrator and story, to grapple with both the poignant fissure that fractures the most intimate attachments between individuals and the chasm that historical violence carves between social groups” (262). Throughout her analysis, Bancroft stresses the ethical orientation and dominant of narrative braiding, including both of her cases studies: Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and

Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves. When speaking of the ethical potential or “possibility” in both these cases, Bancroft concludes that these narrative’s distinctive “set of strategies”— including disjunctive temporality and multiple narration— “help train readers to hold multiple, often incommensurate, subjectivities in our minds simultaneously, pushing us to embrace new channels of responsibility that recognize many distinct subjects” (263).

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In Goon Squad, Egan follows several different braids—some “thicker” and others

“thinner—over the course of her novel’s complicated narrative progression. Sasha, Bennie, Lou, and Scotty have some of the thickest braids in the novel, with Egan devoting several chapters to each character’s lives and stories, while other characters such as Jules, Stephanie, Alex, Lulu, and Dolly/La Doll have thinner braids, serving as the focus of narration in just one or two chapters. In general, Egan uses narrative braiding towards a number of different but interrelated purposes: (1) to explore the same narrative events and actions from different perspectives, (2) to explore narrative events and actions at one or two degrees remove—and thus somewhat isolated—from the novel’s thicker braids or sequences, (3) to push back on realist traditions and conventions that privilege particular types of voices, perspective, and hierarchies between narratorial sources, (4) to offer up—particularly through the contrast between Sasha’s and

Bennie’s braids—a critique of the ongoing patriarchy and misogyny in contemporary US life and society, (5) to modulate her own ethical values and commitments through particular situations, narrations, and character-experiences, and (6) to put some limits on readers’ interpretive and evaluative processes in the form of significant narrative and temporal gapping in between chapters and narrations.

Readers encounter Sasha at her youngest age in chapter eleven, “Goodbye, My Love.”

This chapter, focalized through Sasha’s Uncle Ted, discloses how Sasha’s father abandoned her family when she was 6 and how as a teenager she ran away with a rock and roll drummer but was later abandoned by him in Hong Kong. In this chapter’s primary action, Ted eventually tracks Sasha down in Naples, but finds her living in extreme poverty and depending upon theft and prostitution to survive. In chapter ten, “Out of Body,” readers encounter Sasha a few years

104 later, studying music and business at NYU. Narrated by Rob in the second person, this chapter depicts Sasha as a steadfast friend—jumping up on Rob’s hospital bed after his first suicide attempt—insisting “We’re the survivors….Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?” (201). But Rob dies tragically by drowning later in the same chapter, a traumatic event that haunts Sasha throughout the rest of her life. In chapter two, “Gold Cure,” Sasha appears after working for

Bennie for several years at his record company. Sasha and Bennie met outside the Pyramid Club in the early 1990s, and Bennie took her under his wing and had expected her by the time of narration—the early 2000s—to become a record executive in her own right. But Sasha, from

Bennie’s perspective, appears content to continue to work as his assistant, and although Bennie suspects a more complicated rationale at work, he does not bother to investigate. In chapter one,

“Found Objects,” readers encounter Sasha in early “middle-life crisis.” In her mid-30s, Sasha has recently lost her job at Bennie’s company after stealing an expensive pen from an important client. In the chapter’s therapeutic context, Sasha is working with a counselor in hopes of

“writing a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances” (8-9). Sasha is skeptical about this effort, but continues to engage in it nonetheless. In chapter twelve, “Great Rock and

Roll Pauses,” Egan presents Sasha at her oldest age. Now well into “middle age,” Sasha resides with her family in the California desert. Having achieved a modicum of peace and stability,

Sasha now transforms “found objects” from everyday life into works of art.

Egan presents Bennie at his youngest age in chapter three, “Ask Me If I Care.” As a teenager living in the East Bay, Bennie has his eyes set on rock and roll fame and fortune.

Bennie distinguishes himself not through his bass playing but through his gifts of management and promotion, landing his mediocre band, “The Flaming Dildos,” a gig at the famous Mahubay

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Gardens. At the gig, record producer Lou notices Bennie’s drive and determination, and takes him under his wing. In chapter six, “X’s and O’s,” readers encounter Bennie after his meteoric rise to record executive. In the early 1990s, Bennie discovers The Conduits, a fictional band modeled after both The Pixies and Nirvana, which secures him his place in rock and roll history.

In this chapter, Bennie is also confronted by his old friend and bandmate Scotty and skillfully

“manages” his friend into quietly leaving his office and his life. In chapter seven, “A to B,”

Bennie appears in the days leading up to his divorce and “middle-life crisis.” After a decade of rock and roll excess, Bennie and his wife Stephanie have moved to Crandale, New Jersey to raise a family. There, the couple tries to fit in by joining a local country club, but while Stephanie learns to “pass,” Bennie’s Hispanic ethnicity in the aftermath of 9/11 renders him “suspicious” and “a possible terrorist” in the eyes of some members. Bennie grows resentful and quits going to the club, but also starts an affair with his wife’s tennis partner, leading to the divorce. In chapter two, “Gold Cure,” readers encounter Bennie a year or two after his divorce. While

Bennie is adjusting to life on his own—with great help from Sasha—he finds himself struggling with recurrent “shame memories,” resentments about the digitalization of the music industry, and sexual impotency. In search of a quick fix, Bennie has taken to dissolving gold flakes in coffee— an Aztec aphrodisiac—and tests the efficacy of his “cure” by frequently ogling Sasha’s breasts.

In chapter thirteen, “Pure Language,” Egan presents Bennie at his oldest age. Now in his third marriage, Bennie has engineered a social media scheme that lands his old friend Scott a gig that is described retrospectively as the “Woodstock” of its generation. While Bennie may be interested on one level in making things right between himself and Scotty, there is also ample

106 evidence in this chapter that Bennie is simply taking advantage of his friends in a last-ditch effort to re-secure another “peak” and with it more rock and roll fame and fortune.

In the novel’s intricate design, Egan combines Sasha’s and Bennie’s braids to highlight the different opportunities available to each character as they struggle through their lives and with their ethics of time and in so doing offer her novel’s subtle but quite efficient critique of the patriarchy and misogyny that still dominates many aspects of contemporary American life and society. Although Egan indicates that Bennie encounters racism throughout his life, his early professional affiliation with the white and powerful Lou smooths his entry into the competitive, male-dominated world of the recording industry in the early 1980s. In contrast, Sasha is abandoned by her father early in life, and continues to grapple with that absence well into middle-age. In a way, Bennie takes Sasha under his wing, but also does not make any concerted efforts to promote her career. In chapter two, Bennie indicates that Sasha should have been a record executive by the time of the main action, but also makes amply clear that it would be best for him if Sasha stays in her current position as his assistant. Notably, Egan combines this proclivity with chapter seven’s exploration of Bennie’s infidelity to situate him along an ethical continuum with Lou, his mentor. In the chapters devoted to Lou, Egan’s critique of the gender divide operative in American pop culture, rock and roll, and the recording industry is at its most pointed. Chapter three, four, and five function as a concise but significant sequence in the novel’s rhetorical design and ethical project. Chapter three offers readers a close account of

Lou’s sexual exploitation of the teenage Jocelyn. There is a clear discrepancy in age, power, and opportunity between Lou and Jocelyn, which he takes advantage of for several years, resulting in what Jocelyn describes as her “lost twenties.” Chapter four portrays a younger Lou, equally

107 enamored with his wealth and power and equally inclined to translate either into sexual conquest or exploitation. Chapter five then concludes the sequence, showing Lou exhausted by a life of excess and toxic masculinity.

Onto this ethical continuum, Egan grafts Bennie’s sequence, explored at length in the novel’s central chapters. Notably, Egan’s representation of Bennie includes more admirable qualities in comparison with Lou. For instance, in chapter three, Bennie evidences a capacity not only for shame but also for ethical redirection. In this way, Egan intimates more generally that the gendered construction of pop culture, rock and roll, and the recording industry are changing somewhat in the 1990s and 2000s. In contrast to Lou’s 1970s where a female executive was an extreme rarity, Bennie in chapter three indicates the expectation that women can rise to positions of power. But Egan also uses chapters twelve and thirteen to indicate that movement or change is gradual rather than rapid, and that many of the same gender divides at work in historical versions of these institutions in the novel continue to exist in different forms in the not-too-distant future.

Crucially, Sasha in chapter twelve decides to leave New York City and the recording industry behind in search of greater peace and stability. Inside Egan’s nuanced critique, this decision is only partially motivated by the gendered construction of the institutions in question, but this factor still plays an important role. In chapter one, Sasha in her mid-30s realizes that she cannot forever play the part of Bennie’s young, beautiful assistant, and with little prospect of a promotion, would soon find herself without a job. Then, in chapter thirteen, Bennie remains the controlling agent behind Scotty’s late-in-life success, relying heavily on Lulu, who acts something like Sasha’s replacement, although in possession of different philosophical convictions, professional skills, and technological know-how. As an important part of her larger

108 critique, Egan shows a sustained interest in the promises and powers of different technologies to overcome or minimize the gendered construction of the institutions in question. Egan in her final chapter makes clear that while some technologies possess this potentiality, rarely is that potential realized in the highly gendered and capitalistic context of American life and society, a state of affairs that Egan projects into the not-too-distant-future and beyond. Here, it is worth mentioning that in Egan’s short story, “Black Box” (2012), Lulu and other women are put into positions of great vulnerability and danger, acting as spies in the ongoing fight against terrorism, while men ostensibly sit in control centers monitoring these women’s engagements, including their sexual liaisons with criminals, gangsters, and suspected terrorists. In this not-too-distant future, technology offers men and women very different positions in the fight against terrorism, as distant male agents hope to convert these women’s suffering and degradation into so-called

“peace” and “security.”

Refraction through Future-Oriented Representation: Ethical Consequences

Egan refracts her realist interests through future-oriented representation throughout Goon

Squad. Here, my term “future-oriented representation” includes both the far-reaching prolepses in chapters four and ten and the more concerted ventures into science fiction in chapters twelve and thirteen, set in the not-too-distant future of the 2020s. Through this method of refraction,

Egan builds onto the purposes of disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, and braided narrative previously described by concentrating on the long-term personal and ethical consequences of actions, words, and decisions portrayed in earlier parts of individual sequences and in other character engagements throughout the narrative progression. While Egan uses far- reaching prolepses and her early chapters that are set later in the novel’s chronology (chapter

109 five) to initiate this process—offering her readers therein summaries of a character’s life or depictions of a character much later in his/her own personal and ethical development—this means of refraction culminates in the final two chapters where Egan explores more sustained representations of Sasha’s and Bennie’s not-too-distant futures, in which each character’s braid or sequence tends toward a state of closure. For instance, in chapter four, “Safari,” Egan concludes the chapter with a conspicuous prolepsis about Lou’s girlfriend Mindy: “When both

[Mindy’s] children are in high school, she’ll finally resume her studies, complete her Ph.D. at

UCLA, and begin an academic career at forty-five, spending long periods of the next thirty years doing social structures fieldworld in the Brazilian rain forests” (82). Conceptually, these prolepses provide something like a “Wikipedia” entry on a character’s life, allowing readers to pull out of the immediate storyworld of a given chapter for a moment and engage with a larger view of a character’s personal and ethical development. While such temporal movements disrupt verisimilitude and in doing so make evident the novel’s synthetic component, such movements are also a critical means through which Egan links her semi-autonomous chapters and thus tightens her refraction of and narrative braiding around particular ethical questions and concerns.

In chapters twelve and thirteen, Egan offers more fully-formed future worlds. In Egan’s not-too-distant future, she explores a time ten to fifteen years after the original publication date of Goon Squad in 2010. In her future-oriented representation, she sticks to recognizable locales—in chapter twelve, the California desert, and in chapter thirteen, New York City—and she extrapolates closely from existing social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental crises and problematics in order to reinforce the possibility and plausibility of the represented futures as well as offer some realist and ethical commentary on contemporary beliefs and

110 practices. For instance, climate change continues to ravage the planet in both chapters, resulting in a serious drought in California and in water wars on the East Coast. Moreover, the war on terrorism is still no nearer to a conclusion with governmental authorities continuing to clamp down on personal liberties for the sake of national security.

In chapter twelve, Egan uses future-oriented representation to bring Sasha’s braid to a state of closure, exploring long-term consequences of her personal and ethical struggles, and to highlight three different modes of disjunctive storytelling (musical pauses, Alison’s PowerPoint presentation, and Sasha’s “found objects” collages), emphasizing how their particular affordances render them particularly responsive to the ethical complexities of character’s lives and the world they live in. In the final paragraphs of chapter eleven, Egan uses a far-reaching prolepsis to transition to Alison’s PowerPoint presentation in chapter twelve. There, Egan indicates that “after [Sasha] reconnected on Facebook with her college boyfriend [Drew] and married late…and had two children [Alison, Lincoln], one of whom was slightly autistic; when she was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her, Ted, long divorced—a grandfather—would visit Sasha at home in the California desert” (233).

Now with the major characters set out, chapter twelve proceeds as an intradiegetic object:

Alison’s PowerPoint, comprised of seventy five black and white “slides” in landscape format wherein she makes use of many of the spatial and graphical affordances of this medium. (For readers who want a more “authentic” experience of the PowerPoint, Egan offers a full-color and more interactive version of the presentation along with other supplementary materials including musical playlists designed specifically for individual chapters on her website.) Alison, now twelve-years old, regards PowerPoint as a diary format, repurposing skills she is learning in

111 school to “research” the life and culture of her family. Her PowerPoint follows her families’ activities closely over a two day period, “May 14th & 15th, 202-,” and is broken up into four distinct sections. The chapter’s primary action focuses on an ongoing struggle between Drew and

Lincoln. Drew, the rational doctor, fails to understand his son’s obsession with “Great Rock and

Roll Pauses,” which refers to the moments in rock or pop songs when the music suddenly comes to stop, sometimes deceiving first-time listeners into thinking that the song in fact has come to an end. In section three, this conflict comes to a head. On one occasion, Drew questions Lincoln’s interest in and passion for such things: “I’d love to know why the pauses matter so much to you”

(278). When Lincoln responds with a very technical comparison between two noteworthy pauses, Drew explodes “Stop. Stop. Please. Forget I asked,” and Lincoln runs crying from the room. Then Sasha, “furious,” answers Drew pointblank, before following Lincoln (280): “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved.

But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME.

THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL” (281).

In the chapter’s ensuing action, this statement leads gradually to the realignment of different family members. In a later scene, for instance, Drew enters Lincoln’s bedroom in an effort to make up, and readers are left to assume that this move renews intimacy between husband and wife. At the same time, Sasha appears to be speaking to a larger truth about time and mortality. The “false endings” in life (and in the pop-songs modelled on life) afford us intimations of our own deaths. In addition, Egan uses Sasha’s statement to offer implicit commentary on her own disjunctive aesthetics. In this chapter, Egan explores several different modes of disjunctive storytelling. Lincoln is fascinated by the parts of rock or pop song that

112 threaten their coherence, going so far as to make loops of his favorite pauses, which his sister poetically describes as “A whisper of orange on the horizon” or “A thousand black turbines”

(251). Sasha, since moving from New York City, has transformed her kleptomania into an artistic endeavor wherein she gathers “found objects,” including scraps of paper, advertisements, mailings, and grocery lists, in order to make collages on large sheets of cardboard that she eventually sets out in the desert, allowing the weather to complete her work. Alison’s visual- spatial project more insistently relies on “stops and starts” than the more conventional prose chapters in novel, affording readers the opportunity to follow many competing “threads” within and between individual slides towards a larger whole and ethical purpose. Notably, in each of these modes, Egan uses gaps or “pauses” to guide her readers towards particular interpretive and ethical judgments, while simultaneously placing limits on those processes. Clearly, Sasha has

“arrived” both personally and ethically in this chapter’s narrative action, and yet, the PowerPoint offers us a single and a very particular view on Sasha’s later life—the perspective of a questioning but ultimately loving daughter. Alongside these disjunctive modes of storytelling,

Egan positions her own. These intradiegetic insets function as mises-en-abyme—scale models of

Goon Squad itself—although readers have more direct access to Alison’s PowerPoint and to the songs Lincoln analyzes while relying entirely Alison’s descriptions of Sasha’s found-object collages. With Lincoln, Sasha, and Alison, Egan celebrates the immense power and potentiality of the “pause” throughout her narrative and rhetorical design. Most recently, her final two chapters focus on narrative action occurring roughly at the same time but separated by abrupt shifts in narrative construction.

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In the novel’s final chapter, Egan uses future-oriented representation to offer a final and much more ethically ambiguous portrait of Bennie and to explore two additional modes of disjunctive storytelling (Bennie’s social media “parroting” scheme and Lulu’s T’ing). Set again in the 2020s, chapter thirteen’s heterodiegetic narration closely follows Bennie’s efforts to turn his old friend Scotty into a rock and roll star. In the years leading up to this chapter’s narrated action, Bennie has fallen into disrepute in the industry after serving human excrement at a shareholders meeting. Bennie is now in his early 60s, has remarried, and is raising a young child.

For Bennie, Scotty represents a last-ditch effort to get back on top of the industry. Lulu, Dolly/La

Doll’s daughter, now works as his assistant, and she is putting together, with the help of Alex,

Sasha’s date in chapter one, a blind team of “parrots,” who are being paid to promote Scotty’s brand and upcoming concert online. The chapter culminates with Scotty’s outdoor concert in downtown Manhattan, an event that comes to be described as the “Woodstock” of its generation.

Despite the overwhelming success of Scotty’s concert, Egan raises ethical questions about

Bennie’s social media scheme and his treatment of Scotty throughout the chapter.

On the one hand, Egan indicates how Bennie’s scheme is just the latest version of the industry’s attempt to generate hype and stimulate consumption. In the earlier days of rock and roll, radio studios gave away “free” tickets to events of affiliated artists, and labels organized free multi-performer concerts intended to introduce the public to lesser known or just lesser talents. On the other hand, Egan is interested in how social media is being used to enlist “friends and family” as intermediaries and the long-term ethical consequences of “lying” to one another through marketing schemes like those described in this chapter. What does it mean when Alex becomes the “parrot” that inadvertently provokes his wife and child to go see Scotty perform?

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What does it mean when Alex feels the need to conceal this role from his family? In a parallel track, Egan targets Bennie’s treatment of Scotty in the moments leading up to the concert. There, for the first time in the chapter, Egan describes Scotty through Alex’s focalization: “an old roadie slumped on black folding chairs…A guy with gutted cheeks and hands so red and gnarled he looked like he’d have trouble playing a hand of poker, much less the strange sensuous instrument clutched between his knees?” (332). Time’s goon squad has continued to “work on” Scotty since his last appearance in chapter six. Readers then learn that Scotty is terrified to go out on stage, and rather than attempting to calm him, Bennie has devised a brilliant and ultimately successful process of inducement. First, Alex plays the part of the “strong man,” blocking Scotty’s path of flight. When Scotty in his terror proves too powerful for Alex, Bennie calls in Lulu, whose confidence and sexuality, “neutralize” Scotty, sending him out onto stage in something of a trance. While Scotty surely does benefit from this inducement—finally arriving on the big stage and sharing his music with “the world,” Egan’s handling—offering only the slightest glimpse of

Scotty’s subjectivity throughout and his state of affairs after the performance—maintains readers’ focus on Bennie’s motivations and underlying ethical deficiencies. In this future world,

Bennie has no qualms about putting his own needs above those of an “old friend.” Thus, despite

Bennie’s many efforts to grow and develop, a significant part of him is still aligned with the ethical trajectory of mentor Lou. In other words, the pursuit of rock and roll fortune and fame continue to trump most other ethical questions and concerns for Bennie. Of the chapter’s two modes of disjunctive storytelling, T’ing on the whole fares better than does social media.

Throughout the chapter, Egan “transcribes” many T’d messages, indicating that the medium can be both complex and beautiful. Compared to Bennie’s “parroting” marketing strategy, readers

115 have much more direct access to this disjunctive medium and textuality. At one point, Alex poetically muses: “th blu nyt,” “th stRs u cant c,” and “Th hum that nevr gOs awy” (340). Here, the dropping of certain vowels and consonants and the capitalization of letters in the middle of words gives these lines a polished concision and an expanse of innuendo reminiscent of some modernist and postmodernist poetry. That being said, T’ing is also the primary means through which “parrots” communicate to one another, indicating the medium’s ethical “ambidexterity”— referring to how different purposes and uses imbue the resulting constructions and communications with a range of ethical values and commitments.

Regarding social media, Egan’s novel offers a short history of its development and its ethical controversies across her narrative progression. In earlier far-reaching prolepses in chapters four, ten, and eleven, Facebook serves primarily as a method for reuniting various characters. Most notably, Sasha and Drew reconnect using Facebook, and so in some sense, the platform is instrumental in orchestrating the relative peace and stability evident in chapter twelve. That being said, chapter thirteen explores more commercial and ethically problematic uses of social media. Mid-chapter, Lulu and Alex argue about whether “parroting” is “selling out.” For Lulu, new technologies have largely outmoded traditional or conventional concepts like

“ethical purity,” “inherent wrongdoing,” and “the self.” But Egan herself appears to be more on the side of Alex’s resistance. Granting the complex imbrication between personal preferences and commercial forces in the new digital economy, Egan uses this chapter to raise questions about the more subtle deployment of the concepts of “purity,” “authenticity,” and “the self” by technology companies and proponents as well as the financially motivated non-disclosure of personal and commercial affiliations in new social landscapes and networks.

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Refraction through Chapter-Long Redeployments: Ethical Consequences

In Goon Squad, Egan refracts her realist interests in individual chapters using a variety of different modernist and postmodernist narrative devices and strategies such as multi-modal textuality, second-person narration, metafiction, or metalepsis. In these more punctuated engagements, Egan builds onto the purposes of disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, and braided narrative previously described, using the affordances of particular devices and strategies to generate and complicate her realist portraits of individual characters, to continue her engagement with ethical questions and concerns, and more implicitly to showcase the ethical potentiality of these devices and strategies when redeployed in tandem with a literary aesthetic like refracted realism. Like chapter twelve, chapter nine proceeds as an intradiegetic object, an unpublished article written by Jules Jones, the brother of Bennie’s wife Stephanie, about his interview with movie star Kitty Jackson. In the article, Jules reveals that during that interview he assaults and attempts to rape Kitty after encouraging her to deviate from the assigned schedule and join him for a walk in Central Park. Jules is a good example of what Paul Dawson has referred to as a “pyrotechnic narrator”: he is extremely learned and eloquent, engages in frequent verbal play, is mocking and parodic and oftentimes quite aggressive, and provides a regular or running commentary on the act of narration and/or composition.

In his project, Jules frequently uses footnotes to supplement his description of his interview with Kitty. Early on in the article, for example, Jules provides a page-long footnote exploring Kitty’s impact upon the people she encounters in the restaurant where the interview begins. ““How, puzzled physicists ask, can one particle ‘know’ what is happening to the other?

How, when the people occupying tables nearest to Kitty Jackson inevitably recognize her, do

117 people outside the line of vision of Kitty Jackson, who could not conceivably have had the experience of seeing Kitty Jackson, recognize her simultaneously” (168-69). Throughout the article, Jules returns to concepts from astrophysics and quantum mechanics in order to depict

Kitty as a “force of nature” and himself as “another helpless victim” in an effort to minimize his culpability and ethical deficiency. According to Jules’s logic, Kitty exerts so much power over her fans and admirers that they cannot be legally or personally held accountable for how they react to her physical presence. Despite Egan’s sustained critique of both Jules and this ethically deficient line of thinking, she also actively seeks to portray him as another combatant with time’s goon squad.

In an earlier chapter, Egan offers an extended portrait of Jules after he has served his three-year prison sentence, emphasizing his attempt at that time to find a new ethical direction.

Then in chapter nine, Egan explores some of the motivating causes and conditions behind Jules’s mental and ethical breakdown. After college, Jules moves to New York City in order to pursue a literary career, but after little success, he gives up and takes a job as reporter for a celebrity magazine. Although feeling much diminished by this process, Jules, three years prior to the narrated action in the article, meets Janet Green in Central Park and falls in love, but when she dumps Jules a few weeks before the interview, he starts to unravel. Despite these mitigating circumstances, Egan vividly portrays Jules’s misogyny, violence, patriarchy, elitism, and ethical opacity in the remainder of the article. Notably, Jules is writing this article several months after going to prison. While he is able to maintain a veneer of playfulness and wit in the first few pages of the article, he quickly sets aside this “persona” and in so doing reveals the depths of his ethical depravity. In a particularly shocking passage, Jules recounts his feelings just prior to the

118 attack: “I feel this crazy—what?—rage, it must be; what else could account for my longing to slit

Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her” (182). Here,

Jules indicates that in the moment he both intends to rape and kill Kitty, and then in the months since he has continued to cultivate homicidal fantasies, maintaining a clear ethical alignment with the original crime. At the same time, Egan’s disjunctive method ultimately compels readers to complicate these judgments: clearly, Jules is unhinged, but his attack does play an integral part in jarring Kitty from her trance of celebrity self-delusion and in changing her life for the better, as depicted in chapter eight.

In my approach, I seek to emphasize the complex differentiation between Jules’s and the implied Egan’s projects and purposes across the chapter’s narrative progression and how Egan uses this differentiation to explore both the attraction, limitations, and dangers of postmodernist play and metafiction. In Jules’s project, he is generally unwilling to acknowledge or engage with his own ethical deficiencies and his abuse and traumatization of Kitty, using metafictional and other devices to reinforce his status as her unwitting “victim.” In a recent article, Katherine D.

Johnston argues that Egan is offering up Jules’s article as representative of “a type of masculinist metafiction that neglect the ways gender is central to understanding the embodied experience”

(173). For Johnston, David Foster Wallace is Egan’s likely target, but in my approach, the exact corollary is of less importance than Egan’s intention to distinguish herself from what Johnston and others refer to as “first-generation postmodernist metafiction.” Accordingly, Egan in this chapter seeks to practice a different form of metafiction, informed by the genre’s “feminist genealogy,” including writers like Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, and Kathy Acker. At

119 the authorial level, Egan uses Jules’s article to highlight how this “masculinist” mode of

“metafiction” is dangerous precisely to the extent that its many charms can be used to deflect attention away from ethical controversies and deficiencies.

Conclusion

In Goon Squad, Egan maintains her realist interests in the mimetic and thematic throughout the novel’s complicated narrative progression but refracts those interests through disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, narrative braiding, future-oriented representation, more punctuated redeployments of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies in order to explore a host of ethical questions and concerns about time, memory, storytelling, trauma, and recovery and to characterize the ethical complexity and ambiguity of contemporary US life and society. In the novel’s innovative narrative and rhetorical design, Egan uses multiple perspectives and shifting time frames to modulate her own ethical values and commitments in relation to the particular situations and experiences of different characters and narrators.

Conceptually, the novel’s diverse methods of refraction allow her to pivot expertly and organically between (1) her broader thematic and ethical interests and concerns, (2) her character’s ethical activities, positions, and presuppositions, and (3) her own ethical values and commitments towards an ethic of rhetorical project or design (the complex synthesis between the ethics of the telling and the ethics of the told) that proceeds less like a “dictate from on high” and more like “a conversation between different stakeholders.”

One way of approaching Egan’s refracted realism is to emphasize how she uses her several methods of refraction to push back on realist traditions and conventions that privilege particular voices and perspectives (global, “omniscient,” heterodiegetic, or homodiegetic).

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Notably, Egan does not cultivate an explicit, “governing,” heterodiegetic frame through which she actively and more visibly orchestrates and intimates connections between individual narrative braids, but rather works more implicitly through a variety of different measures including far-reaching prolepses, familial relations between characters, spatial and temporal proximities between characters, narrative sequencing, and “timely” reflections or proclamations by individual characters or narrators.

But when approached from a different direction, Egan’s redeployment of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and technique can be said to tap into and even expand “the ethical space” constitutive of many different methods of realist representation. Here, I am speaking of how many realist authors foreground ethical questions and concerns in their aesthetic projects and thus invite their readers into a multi-staged and multi-dimensional ethical experience through the narrative progression. In this second sense, Egan uses her novel to open up a critical and ongoing conversation about the ethics of time, ethical judgements, the possibility of ethical change or transformation in tandem with a wide-ranging exploration of recent and contemporary US life and society.

At the same time she is expertly guiding her readers—through her different narrative engagement, their intricate sequences, and the narrative and temporal gaps in between—towards a vital confrontation with what I am describing as the “ethically ambidextrous” nature of storytelling. In other words, while different modes of storytelling bring with them various affordances and potentialities that do indeed complicate and/or enrich the ethical projects of individual characters, the ethical nature of these uses and storytelling more generally lies less in the medium and more in the message—in its intent, purposes, and consequences—and

121 ultimately, in its author, creator, or distributor. As such, a message in T or a PowerPoint presentation can be said to have a variety of different ethical purposes and consequences. That being said, Egan in Goon Squad has combined her realist interests with modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies to generate a work of refracted realism that is both technically innovative and ethically engaging.

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Chapter 5: Conclusion

Two Problematics: New Aesthetic Dominant and Contemporary Realism

In this dissertation, I weigh in on two important and widely debated problematics in the study of contemporary US literature, culture, media, and society. In the first, I grapple with the nature of the new aesthetic dominant following the “waning” or “wake” of literary postmodernism, arguing that the new dominant is an ethical one, focused on questions about value and power and that under its influence US authors have pursued a wide range of literary aesthetics in an attempt to reckon with the difficulty and necessity of making interpretive and evaluative judgments in an era marked by late capitalism, digital media, globalization, rising populism, and enduring social, financial, racial, gender, and regional inequalities and inequities.

In the second, I explore the nature of contemporary realist practice under the continuing influence of literary modernism and postmodernism arguing that since the 1990s, authors as diverse as Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan,

Junot Díaz, Chimananda Adichie, Teju Cole, Lauren Groff, and Jesmyn Ward have developed and utilized a form of realism I describe as “refracted realism” in which these authors “refract” their realist interests in the mimetic and thematic components through modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices in order to explore a wide range of ethical questions and concerns and affirm a wide range of ethical values and commitments.

Constitutive Nexus: Mimetic-Thematic-Synthetic-Ethical

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In this dissertation, I examine Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), Teju Cole’s Open

City (2011), and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) as three noteworthy examples of refracted realism in order to (1) characterize the basic and/or recurring narrative and rhetorical elements of the refracted realism aesthetic, (2) highlight the great diversity in how representative authors choose to work with and express those basic elements, and (3) study the broader development of refracted realism under the emergence of the ethical dominant. In the first case, I have defined the “minimal conditions” of refracted realism in terms of the foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components and an ethical dominant, even as the refraction works through the author's handling and intensification of the synthetic component. In this section, I will speak primarily to the mimetic-synthetic part of the nexus, and will address thematics and ethics in later sections. While Roth, Cole, and Egan each handle the mimetic component a little differently, their fictions at the same time clearly foreground readers’ interests in this component as a critical part of their narrative design and rhetorical processes. In The

Human Stain, Roth consistently foregrounds his reader’s interests in characters as “possible people” and in the narrative world “as like our own,” even as he refracts the mimetic component through narratorial stubbornness. Nevertheless, his ethical project hinges on the existence of a single narrative world beneath the novel’s several narratorial hypotheses. In Open City, the mimetic component initially proceeds in a much more straightforward fashion with Cole using

Julius’s narration to provide a highly realistic depiction of New York City several years after

9/11. Late in the novel, Julius’s “paradoxical paralipsis” refracts the novel’s mimetic component, but Cole confines this breach primarily to Julius’s narratorial processes, leaving much of the narrative world “undisturbed.” In Goon Squad, Egan’s constant shifts in time, perspective, and

124 style amount to a more active synthetic component throughout the narrative progression, and yet, in each of her chapters, she foregrounds her reader’s interest in her characters as “possible people” as she uses these different engagements to offer a realist critique of contemporary US life and society.

Redeployment of Modernist and Postmodernist Narrative Strategies

In addition to this “constitutive nexus,” the refracted realism aesthetic characteristically features the redeployment of various modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and techniques towards ethical ends and purposes. To reiterate, these strategies and techniques are conventionally associated with literary modernism and postmodernism, and under the influence of the ethical dominant, these authors explore their potentiality for different uses towards different effects and/or consequences. In The Human Stain, Roth “refracts” his realist interests primarily through narratorial stubbornness and unreliability. In the novel, stubbornness is the dominant narratorial frame, while unreliability is a narratorial hypothesis within that frame. In other words, stubbornness makes it difficult to confirm or deny whether Nathan is the unreliable narrator of the novel’s heterodiegetic sections. In this way, Roth subtly shifts attention away from Nathan’s unreliable telling towards the difficulty and necessity of making interpretative and evaluative judgements in contemporary conversations about race, history, identity, and violence.

In Open City, Cole “refracts” his realist interests complexly through several dynamics in Julius’s narration—“rhetorical seduction,” “paradoxical paralipsis,” and delayed disclosure. Through the first two dynamics, Cole cultivates the initial perception that the work-in-progress is a neo- modernist one focused on epistemological questions and concerns. But delayed disclosure ushers in a multilayered ethical critique in which he complexly explores both the attractions, limitations,

125 and dangers of Julius’s theoretical investments. In Goon Squad, Egan “refracts” her realist interests through disjunctive temporality, multiple narration, future oriented representation, and other modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and techniques. Egan combines disjunctive temporality and multiple narration to give her novel its characteristic “narrative braiding.” She then uses that narrative braiding to explore a range of different ethical problematics and perspectives and to engage in a critique of the ongoing patriarchy and misogyny at work in contemporary US life and society. Egan’s novel also features chapter-long redeployment of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and techniques such as second-person narration, multimodal textuality, and metafiction as an integral part of the novel’s ethical project.

Modes of Refraction

By “refraction,” I am referring primarily to how these authors “bend” or complicate their realist interests in the mimetic and thematic component through their synthetic handling of specific modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and devices in order to explore particular ethical questions and concerns. As a literary process, “refraction” can take many forms depending on the specific designs and purposes of a given project. Most generally, we can theorize refraction in terms of a work’s relationship to the new ethical dominant. On one end of the spectrum, a work involves an ongoing state of tension between the rising ethical dominant and other aesthetic dominants. On the other end, a work is driven by an ethical dominant from beginning to the end of the narrative progression. In The Human Stain, Roth’s refraction through narratorial stubbornness activates and intensifies his novel’s engagements with modernism’s epistemological questions and concerns. The novel’s “gray areas” are quite extensive and put

126 significant limits on readers’ abilities to “know” precisely what has happened. That being said,

Roth carefully cordons off the novel’s epistemological indeterminacies in order to keep his significant ethical interests and investments in play. What results is an enduring state of tension between this work’s epistemological and ethical engagements. In Open City, Cole’s refraction through Julius’s narratorial dynamics results in a more “instrumental” mode of refraction. Cole uses rhetorical seduction and delayed disclosure to offer two different impressions about the novel’s aesthetic dominant, even as the delayed disclosure allows him to focus his readers’ attentions on the enduring ethical complexities and problematics that result. In the process, the initial impression of the novel’s neo-modernism becomes an important part of Cole’s critique, as he asks his readers to consider how their own assumptions, biases, and ethical values about

Julius’s profession, intellectual interests, and eloquence contributed to their initial misreading of his character and ethical purposes. In Goon Squad, Egan’s methods of refraction result in a more even distribution of ethical questions and concerns across its narrative progression. In each chapter, Egan situates one or more of her characters in the midst of an ethical controversy or crisis. That being said, she uses disjunctive temporality and multiple narration to put important limits on her readers’ ability to track personal and ethical developments across chapters and sections.

Sketching out the New Ethical Dominant via Refracted Realism

The literary movement I am identifying and theorizing in this dissertation is defined by the emergence of a new ethical dominant in US literature since the late 1990s in which its characteristic route to ethics is through “refracted realism.” As a literary movement, refracted realism, arguably, offers authors a distinctive approach to and perspective on ethical questions

127 and concerns. Here, I would emphasize the stark contrast between the caricature of literary postmodernism that circulated through literary, critical, and more popular circles during the

1990s and 2000s with the much more nuanced viewpoints on modernism and postmodernism held by the authors in my dissertation’s case studies. Rather than setting up postmodernism, for instance, as does Tom Wolfe in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” as a logical and rhetorical antithesis, Roth, Cole, and Egan are on much more comfortable terms with their literary predecessors and contemporaries. For Roth, Cole, and Egan, literary modernism and postmodernism extend contemporary authors valuable resources for the construction of characters, narrators, and narrative worlds and for the pursuit and complication of particular ethical issues and controversies. As many commentators of the “new realism” have already noted, contemporary realist authors are not after a “naïve” return to a world that predates the epistemological disorientation of modernism/ity and the ontological multiplication of postmodernism/ity, but rather recognize epistemological and ontological indeterminacies and aporias as an indelible and inescapable part of the contemporary landscape, seeking to fashion ethical values, commitments, and projects that are responsive to the actual “situation on the ground.” In their responses (and as a characteristic aspect of refracted realism), Roth, Cole, and

Egan do not seek to “bracket off” the epistemological or the ontological or to “collapse” the epistemological and the ontological into the ethical in the fashion reminiscent of Lévinas’s later works, but rather they seek to maintain an ongoing interplay between these aesthetics and others in their pursuit of particular ethical ends and purposes. In this context, using the specific set of strategies of the refracted realist aesthetic, authors such as Roth, Cole, and Egan each grapple in

128 their own particular ways with the difficulty and necessity of making interpretive and evaluative judgments in contemporary US life and society.

Shifting Components: Mimetic Falling, Synthetic Rising

Throughout this project, I have explored the question of the “limits” of the refracted realist aesthetic—here, referring primarily to when a literary work ceases to be a refracted realist one and becomes something different, defined by a different aesthetic. I have concluded that these limits unfold in many different directions simultaneously, but that they can be generalized into two main directions for the sake of discussion. In the first, literary works can evidence the minimal conditions (mimetic-thematic-ethical) but deploy little to no modernist and/or postmodernist narrative strategies and devices, and as such would constitute a more “wholesale” return to historical realism, which itself can be theorized rhetorically in terms of the foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components and the relative backgrounding of the synthetic and joined to a variety of different aesthetic dominants. In the second, the deployment of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and techniques can place increasing pressure on a work’s relative foregrounding of the mimetic and thematic components, resulting eventually in the rising of the synthetic component and the falling of the mimetic component. In all three of my case studies, authors use such tensions or pressures to “add value” to their projects. In The

Human Stain, epistemological indeterminacy heightens and extends the novel’s ethical concerns about the “ecstasy of sanctimony” and the “human stain.” In Open City, “paradoxical paralipsis” allows Cole to amplify both the attractions, limitations, and dangers of Julius’s theoretical investments. In Goon Squad, Egan uses the narrative and temporal gaps in between chapter to

129 both guide and place limits on her readers’ interpretive and evaluative processes. Notably, in each case study, refraction is primarily restricted to narratorial dynamics.

The More “Wholesale Return” to Historical Realism in Contemporary US Fiction

While refracted realism represents an important and influential aesthetic and literary method in the contemporary period, the emergence of the new ethical dominant has also seen the rise or further development of a number of different aesthetics through which representative authors can foreground and interrogate ethical questions and concerns. In conclusion, I will consider two such aesthetics: the more “wholesale” return to historical realism and a more synthetically-oriented subset of contemporary fiction that foregrounds ethical questions and concerns. As already discussed, the more “wholesale” return to historical realism usually involves the foregrounding of realist interests in the mimetic and thematic but without refracted realism’s characteristic redeployment of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies and techniques towards ethical purposes. Authors as diverse as Anne Tyler, Jodi Picoult, Marilynn

Robinson, Edward P. Jones, Joseph O’Neill, Delia Owens, Donna Tartt, and Angela Fournoy have used this form of realism in their recent fiction. In Reading the American Novel 1920-2010,

James Phelan conceptualizes historical realism in terms of a metaphysical aesthetic dominant focused on questions like “What is reality? What are the principles that underlie it? What constraints does the real world put on the action of individuals?” (11). In “contemporary realism,” metaphysical concerns have generally given way to ethical ones. Despite the

“wholesale” return’s more “direct” engagement with ethical questions and concerns, here too authors implicitly register the profound and ongoing impact of modernity/ism and postmodernity/ism in their fictions. As in the refracted realist aesthetic, contemporary

130 practitioners of a more traditional form of literary realism are generally more interested in testing out the “fit” between particular ethical values and commitments and “particular” contexts and historical situations, rather than seizing upon or promoting ethical absolutes or certainties. That being said, the absence of explicit “refracted” elements or features invite some readers to understand these contextualized accounts or inquiries as having some greater or more universal meaning. While these authors can check this tendency in a variety of different ways—most notably through the cultivation of character or narratorial perspectives that caution against the universalization of individual experience—the continuity of appearance, construction, tone, and feel between these contemporary works of realism and their metaphysically-oriented predecessors proves a difficult affiliation to undermine or overwrite. By contrast, refracted realism more consciously and concertedly work against such affiliations even as they maintain connections in other ways—through rhetorical dynamics, thematics, etc.

More Synthetically-Oriented Contemporary US Fiction

The second aesthetic I will consider is a more synthetically-oriented subset of contemporary fiction that foregrounds ethical questions and concerns. In this subset, I include works from Colson Whitehead, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Danielewski,

Salvador Plascencia, Nell Zink, Donald Antrim, and Kathryn Davis. In this aesthetic, these authors foreground the thematic and synthetic component and either significantly complicate or compromise the mimetic component or relatively background it in pursuit of ethical questions and concerns. Generally, these works use a more fully activated synthetic component to amplify and further complicate refracted realism’s focus on the ethics of the telling. Whereas Roth, Cole, and Egan use refraction to complicate their narratorial processes in their consideration of the

131 ethical values and processes at work in a single narrative world, authors in this related more synthetically-oriented aesthetic multiply ontological planes and in so doing offer their readers a more meta-ethical experience wherein, depending upon the construction of individual project, readers can track a characters’ life and ethical development across several different possible worlds as in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013). And yet, multiple ontologies are by no means a prerequisite for this aesthetic, and indeed under the influence of the new dominant, such literary narratives are becoming few and far between. A prominent example of a synthetically- oriented work of fiction that foregrounds ethical questions and concerns and yet does not rely on multiple ontologies is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). In this novel,

Whitehead makes “concrete” the metaphor of the “underground railroad,” combining realist and fantastic elements, in a sustained ethical and historical critique. As Ramón Saldívar suggests, the foregrounding of the synthetic component in such novels makes possible the reactivation of

“utopian” aspirations and desires that may be less accessible in other realist aesthetics.

Conclusion

Since the 2016 presidential election, “ethical puritanism” has been on the rise across many different sectors of US life and society. Here, I use Roth’s term in The Human Stain wherein he re-conceptualizes secular institutions and debates in terms of long-standing religious conflicts and antitheses that date back to the time of the first European settlements in the “New

World.” Since 2016, American politics and public discourse has become increasingly polarized as various factions seek to gain the upper hand in heated controversies over civil rights, immigration, abortion, gun control, trade, and foreign policy. Attending this development is a rising skepticism about the possibility of “objective” or “nonpartisan” news, media, and

132 information. In an era where the accusation of “fake news” suffices as argument, many fear that the very grounds for engaging with the ethical problematics are dissolving as we speak. In this context, a literary movement like refracted realism is all the more important and valuable. The refracted realist works of Roth, Cole, and Egan emphasize the existence of multiple ethical perspectives, the difficulty of making contact across various ethical “divides,” and yet the very real possibility of doing so given enough time and effort on the part of all of the interested parties. While each of these authors comes to their projects with fairly strong ethical values and convictions, they insistently use the strategies and resource of refracted realism to engage with the contexts, forces, and beliefs that inform their positions and to intensify readerly activity as those values are tested out in a variety of sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting situations and perspectives. Here, the temptation may arise to regard literature in general or refracted realism more specifically as some kind redemptive or emancipatory instrument, but authors like Roth, Cole, and Egan would insist that we continue to proceed with caution.

According to these authors, literature and narrative are ethically “ambidextrous” and their short- term and long-term consequences are hard to track and even more difficult to categorize in ethical binaries or absolutes. That being said, an aesthetic or form of literature that has the built- in resources or processes whereby traditional realist commitments can be refracted for multilayered ethical purposes offers some ground for hope in midst of these difficult and uncertain times.

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